Here is one, the Curiosity descent video
Synced with audio feed from the control room - they didn't get the images back until much later though.
Cleaned up and interpolated HD version:
Here is a timelapse of first nine months of Curiosity
And the orbiters also take time lapse type videos. Here is an example, interesting feature on Mars, warm seasonal flows, which may possibly be indirect signs of liquid water, shows various time-lapse shots of them in this video.
And this is one of them in higher detail,
It's mainly a matter of the time it would take to send the images all back to Earth.
Because of the limited bandwidth, which often involves piggybacking on communications with orbital satellites which have their own data to return, then if it took videos, you wouldn't be able to download them for a long time. So they take stills instead.
Curiosity also doesn't have a video camera. So it can only simulate video with a sequence of stills. The successor, Curiosity C will have a video camera so will be able to take real time video. For instance it can take video photographs of the dust devils, or of astronomical phenomena. The camera will also have stereo zoom capability. So it will be able to take real time 3D video on Mars.
NASA chooses ASU to design, operate camera system for Mars 2020 mission
Curiosity was going to have that capability too, but they dropped it. So it has stereo cameras, but not with video capability and they have different focal lengths rather than being stereo zoom, so it can't take 3D pictures in real time at all.
James Cameron director of Avatar was backing that one, but they just didn't quite get it ready in time for the Curiosity launch. But will have it with Curiosity C, a successor. Sorry, James Cameron: NASA Nixes 3-D Camera for Next Mars Rover
Still probably won't get that many videos back even then, just because of the bandwidth issue, it can take them easily, but how can it send them back to Earth? Probably only really important videos e.g. of dust devils or whatever.
But the big thing that would change all this is if we can increase the bandwidth for Mars. If we had satellites in orbit around Mars dedicated to communications to Earth and especially if e.g. the idea of high bandwidth communication via laser to Earth worked out - then that would lead to a flood of images coming back from Mars, and then we could stream video from the surface, perhaps even in real time.
Same for our orbiters also. They can take videos too, timelapse,. of seasonal processes. But at the moment, typically there are many days between each frame, lots of photographs that we want, can only devote so many to a particular process.
A higher bandwidth for the images from Mars would also speed up our rovers. I think it is reasonable to say that the main thing that slows our rovers down is the low bandwidth of the connection with Mars.
Opportunity took over a decade to travel as far as Lunakhod 2 traveled in a few months on the Moon.
Because of the low bandwidth, and limited opportunities to communicate with Mars - typically you only get images back once a day. Which means, that you probably couldn't drive the rovers much faster and get much more done per day if they were at Pluto, if data rate was the same.
With a faster data rate, maybe not drive them as fast as on the Moon, but a lot faster than our present rovers on Mars. Maybe better than Lunakhod also given that we have advances in everything including can build our rovers with a fair bit of autonomy nowadays, getting better all the time.
And everything would be done much more quickly, not just driving. We could also use techniques used in video gaming, of simulating the Mars environment on Earth so you can drive around on it, in the simulated environment with reasonable confidence because the rover is moving on an identical environment on Mars, again that could speed things up a fair bit - especially if you are spending a lot of time studying some particular interesting spot on Mars, you'd soon have a near to perfect simulation of it and could drive around it, knowing exactly what is behind every boulder etc.
But first you need to get more bandwidth for the data.
Synced with audio feed from the control room - they didn't get the images back until much later though.
Cleaned up and interpolated HD version:
Here is a timelapse of first nine months of Curiosity
And the orbiters also take time lapse type videos. Here is an example, interesting feature on Mars, warm seasonal flows, which may possibly be indirect signs of liquid water, shows various time-lapse shots of them in this video.
And this is one of them in higher detail,
That one's got eight photographs of the way it develops over an entire year (and that's a lot, usually is just four or five photographs taken of an interesting feature like this). It would be great if we could have video frames every day of a feature like this :). Also may vary during the day too, the photographs are all taken at about the same time of day.
It's mainly a matter of the time it would take to send the images all back to Earth.
Because of the limited bandwidth, which often involves piggybacking on communications with orbital satellites which have their own data to return, then if it took videos, you wouldn't be able to download them for a long time. So they take stills instead.
Curiosity also doesn't have a video camera. So it can only simulate video with a sequence of stills. The successor, Curiosity C will have a video camera so will be able to take real time video. For instance it can take video photographs of the dust devils, or of astronomical phenomena. The camera will also have stereo zoom capability. So it will be able to take real time 3D video on Mars.
NASA chooses ASU to design, operate camera system for Mars 2020 mission
Curiosity was going to have that capability too, but they dropped it. So it has stereo cameras, but not with video capability and they have different focal lengths rather than being stereo zoom, so it can't take 3D pictures in real time at all.
James Cameron director of Avatar was backing that one, but they just didn't quite get it ready in time for the Curiosity launch. But will have it with Curiosity C, a successor. Sorry, James Cameron: NASA Nixes 3-D Camera for Next Mars Rover
Still probably won't get that many videos back even then, just because of the bandwidth issue, it can take them easily, but how can it send them back to Earth? Probably only really important videos e.g. of dust devils or whatever.
But the big thing that would change all this is if we can increase the bandwidth for Mars. If we had satellites in orbit around Mars dedicated to communications to Earth and especially if e.g. the idea of high bandwidth communication via laser to Earth worked out - then that would lead to a flood of images coming back from Mars, and then we could stream video from the surface, perhaps even in real time.
Same for our orbiters also. They can take videos too, timelapse,. of seasonal processes. But at the moment, typically there are many days between each frame, lots of photographs that we want, can only devote so many to a particular process.
A higher bandwidth for the images from Mars would also speed up our rovers. I think it is reasonable to say that the main thing that slows our rovers down is the low bandwidth of the connection with Mars.
Opportunity took over a decade to travel as far as Lunakhod 2 traveled in a few months on the Moon.
Because of the low bandwidth, and limited opportunities to communicate with Mars - typically you only get images back once a day. Which means, that you probably couldn't drive the rovers much faster and get much more done per day if they were at Pluto, if data rate was the same.
With a faster data rate, maybe not drive them as fast as on the Moon, but a lot faster than our present rovers on Mars. Maybe better than Lunakhod also given that we have advances in everything including can build our rovers with a fair bit of autonomy nowadays, getting better all the time.
And everything would be done much more quickly, not just driving. We could also use techniques used in video gaming, of simulating the Mars environment on Earth so you can drive around on it, in the simulated environment with reasonable confidence because the rover is moving on an identical environment on Mars, again that could speed things up a fair bit - especially if you are spending a lot of time studying some particular interesting spot on Mars, you'd soon have a near to perfect simulation of it and could drive around it, knowing exactly what is behind every boulder etc.
But first you need to get more bandwidth for the data.
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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