NASA reveals Curiosity 2020's 23-camera payload NASA's revealed its Curiosity 2020 mission will pack 23 cameras. That's a half-dozen more the current Curiosity's 17 cameras, and way ahead of the Pathfinder mission's measly five (two on the lander and three on the Sojourner rover). The Jet Propulsion Laboratory announcement explains what all these cameras are for. …
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if ever my missus complains I have too many cameras. Hey, I have just 2 regular DSLRs, one astro-modded one, and three different planetary CMOS cameras (one monochrome of solar H-alpha, one monochrome hi-res for solar Ca-K and white light, and lunar, and one colour for planets).
I could also just count her shoes again
No, I think you've misunderstood. The idea is that the scanner is looking for life. So what it does is to extrude some tasty, soupy, noodly goodness. Then warm it up with the laser, and see what aliens are attracted by the aroma.
Basically this rover is the first interplanetary delivery service. I wonder why they didn't choose pizza?
Testing a very large (and it will be very large) parachute opening in an atmosphere < 1/160 that of Earth SL pressure is virtually impossible.
This could make a major contribution to better (smaller) parachute design
And how far we've come.
20Mpixel camera --> 450g.
NASA will still have to explain how the rovers can take a selfie. Five years on and every NASA Facebook rover selfie post still has someone screaming, "Fake! It's from outside the rover and no one else is there!"
NASA will still have to explain how the rovers can take a selfie.
Factoid: Every rover's AI is equipped to recognize a roman style helmet.*
Upon spotting one, it politely asks, "Excuse me, Marvin the Martian, could you take my camera and snap a pic of me for the folks back home? Thank you sir."
*This is also how it knows how to avoid taking picture of Martians.
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There's also a microphone. It's the 3rd attempt to capture sounds on Mars.
It's actually supposed to hear the ZAP from the laser vaporizing samples, and they want to correlate the loudness of the zap to the amount vaporized.
However, when it's not doing that, it'll still be on to hopefully capture wind, dust devils, footsteps, Martians talking, amanfrommars1 composing his posts, etc.
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