Thread by @elakdawalla

I think the reason I’m so frustrated about the lack of raw images is that they have, until now, been the focus of my post-landing writing. There’s a new mission on Mars and I want to TEACH!! So, okay, I don’t get to do it with pictures. Ask me anything. I’ll answer as I cook.

By end of mission Perseverance may drive VERY far from safe landing site. By dropping samples closer to flat crater floor, it will be faster/safer/easier to retrieve & return them to where they can be launched to Mars orbit.

https://twitter.com/nickyrozenblatt/status/1363318674283716609

No, in fact rovers deliberately take more images than they can ever return to Earth. Each camera has its own storage & transmits files to main rover computer when commanded for downlink; others flow automatically according to assigned priority, from 1 to 100.

https://twitter.com/d_paulangel/status/1363318779871064066

If a rover ever has a technical difficulty that halts science but still allows routine communication — which happens relatively often, because Mars operations are hard & rovers complex — then low-priority images get surprise-downlinked, making lemonade from lemons.

There’s no joystick pilot. There are software developers and people who test an engineering model in a vacuum chamber on Earth. There are people who write code to be sent to Mars and get executed, autonomously, by the spacecraft on Mars. It takes a village!

https://twitter.com/geneticjen/status/1363318667900026881

There isn’t...yet! Perseverance is collecting samples that might get returned to Earth. We still have to design and build 2 missions that will do that. It’s going to take 10 or 20 years. Your son could be involved in building or operating them.

https://twitter.com/elektrotal/status/1363321026545819655

Never ask a Ph.D. student about how their dissertation is going, and never ask an author how their book is going. Buy me a drink instead.

(More seriously: I told my publisher I won’t be making any progress on the book til my kids are back in school.)

https://twitter.com/davidrollinson/status/1363317739243282433

(Not everything about having kids at home all the time is bad. Far from it. As I write, in fact, my eldest child is COOKING OUR DINNER OMG I am just supervising)

Once Ingenuity is deployed, it’s deployed. No takebacks. I have *not* studied the plans in detail for what they plan to do with it but IIRC the Ingenuity team nominally gets 30 sols of tests before Perseverance gets to formally begin its science mission.

https://twitter.com/jomolungma/status/1363320101823537156

At the outset, landed Mars missions usually receive one direct-from-Earth uplink from a Deep Space Network dish to their high-gain antennas each Mars morning, delivering instructions for the subsequent 24ish Mars hours. They operate autonomously after that.

https://twitter.com/elektrotal/status/1363320821339410436

There are exceptions. If something bad is happening, they can do more uplinks. Late in missions, like on Curiosity, they start delivering more than one sol’s worth of instructions in each uplink, reducing DSN and planning hours to save money.

Current, extant life on Mars is absolutely not ruled out!! However, it can’t exist at surface because current environment is terrible. On Earth, we’ve found life lurking in rocks in the very deepest mines. If life ever began on Mars, the odds it’s still there, deep, seem high.

https://twitter.com/SkepticalAgnost/status/1363322286527426561

Oh, this one’s easy. Venus. What are the rocks, really? What does it look like down there? Why is it different from Earth? What can the composition of the atmosphere and how it varies day-to-day tell us about current volcanic activity? LET ME ROVE VENUS PLEEEEEEEEASE

https://twitter.com/asrivkin/status/1363323543006683137

There’s no GPS for Mars. Rover has an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU, a gyroscope) that helps it dead-reckon distance & direction traveled & pitch & roll. It images the Sun periodically to determine its yaw. Orbiter imaging of rover helps tie all this to Mars’ geodetic network.

https://twitter.com/N4BFR/status/1363321676759511047

I haven’t read details about microphone so I don’t know but I assume well calibrated. Thin Mars atmos attenuates sound; it’d be quieter. Higher frequencies would not transmit efficiently, so overall tone would be deeper. But mic is physically connected to rover, which is NOISY

https://twitter.com/gregoire1960/status/1363318300021776386

They have regular Bayer patterns. 1 thing that’s different is that they don’t inherently have IR-blocking filters. That means Curiosity can do science imaging with filter wheels in infrared wavelengths. Read this blog post for more about that: mastcamz.asu.edu/the-mastcam-z-…

https://twitter.com/mchesnay/status/1363324361189515265

This is how I hope human exploration of Mars will proceed — tele-operation of robotic vehicles from close by. It uses all the advantages of the human brain and manual dexterity while not exposing humans to Mars environment, or Mars environment to microbe-laden humans.

https://twitter.com/buxtonelec/status/1363322574327799809

And with that I need to leave to eat the amazing-smelling dinner that my daughter cooked for me. <3 <3 G’night, all.