2021-02-19 The Mars Rover’s Photos Should Be Live

Jerry Savage
Said, [the Perseverance rover’s cameras] should all be live.”
Well, good luck to you! You’ll be sitting on your butt for the rest of the day waiting for the photos to come onto the screen, pixel by pixel, line by line, until the screen finally fills up. The rover is many tens of millions of miles away on another planet, and the signal is so weak that there are only a few places on earth that have a large enough dish antenna to receive such a weak signal. Then after receiving it, there may be parts of the signal that had errors and those have to be fixed or resent. Then the photo may have to be processed to extract the relevant data. Like your eyes can’t see UV or IR so the photo only needs to show visible light.

So sit down and take a load off your mind. Your impatience will just have to fester and be a pain to you while the magicians at NASA JPL do their magic.

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