NASA reveals secrets of Curiosity’s selfies NASA has published a long and detailed explanation of just how its Curiosity rover managed to take a self-portrait. The agency has posted a video, which we've popped at the bottom of the story, and lengthy text explanations of the way it assembled the shot below. NASA says “Curiosity held the rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager ( …
Speaking of the bearded wonder I was watching Expendables 2 the other night, I hadn't looked at the cast list so was very surprised to see him walking down the street after saving Sly and his buddies.
It really did elicit a loud "No, Fucking, WAY!" :D Awesome.
Is it me or does his beard look like a spray tan applied through a stencil?
A legend indeed :-) He's on TV non stop here stateside advertising the total gym, much rarer to see him in a movie. It's sad to see him reduced to that. I hadn't noticed the beard but now you mention it, it does have that gi joe spray on look. Got to give him credit for staying in such good shape!
After he made his opinions perfectly clear, it is probably for the best if we just let him fade into obscurity.
The NASA denialistas will just say that "recreating" the photo is easy enough as all NASA had to do is just drive it back from the desert to the lab and take a few more snaps with the rose colored filter removed. Unfortunately they will require first hand proof of actually seeing Curiosity wave at them from Mars through a high powered telescope while they are physically standing on the Moon and I'm not sure that will be good enough.
"For pity's sake. Given Neil Armstrong managed to see JFK through a sniper scope from the moon well enough to shoot him dead, I think we should be able to easily see Curiosity from Earth using a simple pair of binocular. Yet we can't. Explain that!!"
That must have been one heck of a shot! Not only over the 240,000 miles from Moon to Earth but also six years back in time. Truly, Armstrong was a hero!
Colin
i think that it is about 2 metres long, so plenty long enough to take some good shots at arms length.
There is a video of the movements here:
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=156880341
it looks like quite a few of the shots were originally taken upside down and then composited together. but i think that you can see from the animation how the arm could articulate to keep itself out of the shots.
She was going to blow the whistle on the whole sound-stage "Mars Trip" so they used Curiosity's laser to zap her, from the bottom up like a good old-time witch burning (it's actually the only part of the lander that works, since rayguns are all that the DoD puppetmasters ever bothered testing). They decided to release this photo as a ghastly warning to all others who oppose the Illuminati.
Now if you want a load of ghostly aberrations try doing a photo montage of a room with a couple of small bored children waiting for Daddy to quit pfaffing around - end result was like Ghostbusters played by midgets, fragments of kids fading in and out all over the show. Stitching software needed a few nudges but luckily it's mostly relying on edge detection & I took generous overlaps.
This post has been deleted by its author
Sir Runcible, you really don't want to know. Really you don't. They have a site. With a lengthy list of forum posts. Can't be arsed to check it out again so you'll have to giggle it. But be warned; you will lose your mind and the will to live if you actually go and check it out. They have many, many answers to anything you could care to throw at them, and skeptical posters are treated with amused tolerance. I'm still trying to spoon my brains back in from my last visit.
I suspect NASA know that there are a hard-core who will never be convinced even if you rubbed their faces in Martian dust whilst giving them a spacesuit wedgie.
The point is that potential converts (who might otherwise be convinced by a 'no way this could have been taken on Mars' argument) have an alternative - and correct - explanation.
I guess they've learned from all the nonsense that sprung up around the moon landings with regard to shadows and fluttering flags, and so on.*
* what I love about conspiracy theories is how they require the conspirators to be both superhuman geniuses and complete cretins - they build a convincing moon set, but then decide that a gentle breeze and some extra lighting would improve the ambience?
"That the agency has recreated the shot with the earth-bound test version of Curiosity could be a sign it is keen to prove the shots are easily achievable"
Or people could just download the bloody raw images that Nasa VERY KINDLY provide us all
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?s=84&camera=MAHLI
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?s=85&camera=MAHLI
Everyone knows the Mars landings are being faked on the Moon, which is ITSELF a fake, the biggest fake and running joke in the history of art and ... history!
THERE IS SIMPLY NO PROOF OF THE MOON! Every depiction of it is a fake. FICTION - DEPICTION! SEE? They both contain the letters 'ICTION' which is a Rosicrucian CODE! SHEEPLE! WAKE UP! Your Government is conning you! EVEN THE SKY LIES - because the sky is owned by COCA-COLA-IBM! What you see in the sky is just the reflection off geese! ORBITAL MIND-CONTROL LASERS, MAN!
The best way to fight the conspiracy theorists is chaff: put stuff like this on web pages, and the nuts start to believe it.
Nasa spent a fortune on Curiosity, then uses its camera to take piccies of itself in the nude, which appear on Facebook, courtesy of NASA.
The "Yoof of today" spend a fortune on a phone with a camera. Then what? They photo themselves and post the piccies on Facebook, often in their "Birthday suits".
Surprised we didn't see "Wish you were here" caption. Oh, sorry, wrong spacerock.
Curiosity didn't take the pictures of itself. It did what any tourist would do... It handed the camera to a local and asked them to take the pictures. ("Does this laser make my butt look big?")
The quality of the snaps just goes to show that Marvin is has handy with a camera as he was with an Illudium Pu-36 Space Modulator.
Even inasmuch as they're also spectacular eye candy, the high-res mosaic "selfies" provide important information to engineers about the state and health of the rover, as well as information about the nature of the terrain the rover is traversing.
On at least two occasions, both MER rovers had become stuck in deep dirt, and the engineers and rover drivers used extensively detailed "selfies" to determine the extent of the predicament, develop extraction solutions, and determine how well these solutions were working. Also, polar-projected panoramic "selfies" of Spirit and Opportunity were used to determine the extent of dust coverage on the solar panels before and after dust storms.
But, yeah... the by-product is really, really cool fotos. That can't be bad.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
