Information blackout (mars rover)

Why is information on the lander/explorer so hard to find?
The official site is written for third grade students.
The only transcription site is spaceflight, and it's
just truncated babble from the "nasa press releases".
The pictures suck, I have set up three computers to display
stereo using shutter glasses, And we get a pile of anaglyph
crap.
Why isn't a transcript of the c-a-c talk available?
I would love to look at the raw data! publish to USENET?

I will support the space program when I get to see what
i'm paying for. And I see nothing but incompetence,
At least in presentation.
Jim Davis.
I may be dumb, But I'm smarter than 98% of you.

jimmydevice wrote:
Why is information on the lander/explorer so hard to find?
The official site is written for third grade students.
The only transcription site is spaceflight, and it's
just truncated babble from the "nasa press releases".

That's the thing I find most annoying.
Seventeen gigabyte flash animations that go "bing" when you
move the cursor over bits, and no plain-text log of what's happening
now.

The pictures suck, I have set up three computers to display
stereo using shutter glasses, And we get a pile of anaglyph
crap.
Why isn't a transcript of the c-a-c talk available?
I would love to look at the raw data! publish to USENET?

Raw data tends to be reserved for the experiment designers, for
political reasons.

On Sat, 24 Jan 2004 02:22:55 -0800, jimmydevice
wrote:

Why is information on the lander/explorer so hard to find?
The official site is written for third grade students.
The only transcription site is spaceflight, and it's
just truncated babble from the "nasa press releases".
The pictures suck, I have set up three computers to display
stereo using shutter glasses, And we get a pile of anaglyph
crap.
Why isn't a transcript of the c-a-c talk available?
I would love to look at the raw data! publish to USENET?

I will support the space program when I get to see what
i'm paying for. And I see nothing but incompetence,
At least in presentation.
Jim Davis.
I may be dumb, But I'm smarter than 98% of you.


How many spacecraft have you designed and launched to Mars????

http://spaceprojects.tk

In article ,
Ian Stirling wrote:


The pictures suck, I have set up three computers to display
stereo using shutter glasses, And we get a pile of anaglyph
crap.
Why isn't a transcript of the c-a-c talk available?
I would love to look at the raw data! publish to USENET?

Raw data tends to be reserved for the experiment designers, for
political reasons.

By "raw data" are you referring to raw images?

If so, check out:

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/spirit.html

--
Stephen Souter

http://www.edfac.usyd.edu.au/staff/souters/

On Sat, 24 Jan 2004 02:22:55 -0800, jimmydevice
wrote:

The pictures suck, I have set up three computers to display
stereo using shutter glasses, And we get a pile of anaglyph
crap.

....If you've really had any experience in doing stereo work, you'd
know that all you'd need to see those images using stereo instead of
anaglyph is to toss the images into Photoshop, switch only to red or
blue channels, save each respectively, and then view. Rest assured
when color stereo pairs are made, they won't be anaglyph.

....The bigger bitch is that they can't seem to stick to one format for
the animations. They need to simply go with MPEG and drop Quickslime
and RM and stick with that.

OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

The pictures suck, I have set up three computers to display
stereo using shutter glasses, And we get a pile of anaglyph
crap.

...If you've really had any experience in doing stereo work, you'd
know that all you'd need to see those images using stereo instead of
anaglyph is to toss the images into Photoshop, switch only to red or
blue channels, save each respectively, and then view. Rest assured
when color stereo pairs are made, they won't be anaglyph.

Has anyone BEEN to the NASA site? There's plenty of panacam images
taken through several filters and taken from left and right cameras
(and usually through near-infrared through both, IIRC). Not quite
raw images, but nearly raw JPEG images.

OK, it may not be a blackout per se, but tomorrow's Opportunity press
briefing may be of particular interest. On NASA-TV today they showed the
reception of data live from an Odyssey pass. The first several images were
eagerly put up--it was night on Mars, so the files were more data from
yesterday (evidently they didn't get it all in the first pass yesterday).
Then Odyssey went behind Mars and they had to wait until it reappeared to
get the rest of the data. When it did, the controller announced that they
had successfully gotten 22 megabytes of data, but was going to give the team
a half-hour to analyze it before releasing, adding that there would be a
press conference in a half hour at 4pm ET. That time came and went with no
briefing. Later the NASA web site said there would be a briefing at 5pm. No
show on that one either. Currently the schedule calls for "commentary" at
9:30pm ET tonight.
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasat..._Breaking.html

Maybe they got some juicy stuff to show? On the other hand, maybe there
wasn't anything real exciting, but they wanted to give everyone including
reporters a break.

In article om, Joe
Knapp wrote:

a half-hour to analyze it before releasing, adding that there would be a
press conference in a half hour at 4pm ET. That time came and went with no
briefing. Later the NASA web site said there would be a briefing at 5pm. No
show on that one either. Currently the schedule calls for "commentary" at
9:30pm ET tonight.
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasat..._Breaking.html

Maybe they got some juicy stuff to show? On the other hand, maybe there
wasn't anything real exciting, but they wanted to give everyone including
reporters a break.

I wouldn't be too surprised - they've been going flat-out these last
couple of days. From personal experience, the one thing likely to delay
an announcement by two hours is trying to get it ready half-an-hour
early...

--
-Andrew Gray

"Gary W. Swearingen" wrote:

The pictures suck, I have set up three computers to display
stereo using shutter glasses, And we get a pile of anaglyph
crap.

...If you've really had any experience in doing stereo work, you'd
know that all you'd need to see those images using stereo instead of
anaglyph is to toss the images into Photoshop, switch only to red or
blue channels, save each respectively, and then view. Rest assured
when color stereo pairs are made, they won't be anaglyph.

Has anyone BEEN to the NASA site? There's plenty of panacam images
taken through several filters and taken from left and right cameras
(and usually through near-infrared through both, IIRC). Not quite
raw images, but nearly raw JPEG images.

What are the raw imagines in, not a lossy JPEG?

"Bill Bonde ( the oblique allusion in lieu of the frontal attack )" writes:

What are the raw imagines in, not a lossy JPEG?

They said that the rover is told to compress most of the images before
transmittal so, for example, the first batch of Spirit pancam images
was not as detailed as some later ones. This leads me to suspect that
they can be lossy or not lossy, but it could be two levels of
lossiness. I have no idea what the raw format is, but it should
include info on time of day, filter settings, pointing data, etc., and
so wouldn't be JPEG files, though I suppose they could contain some
JPEG data plus the other. It's not yet available to the public,
AFAIK.