« Southern Baptists: Let’s Reach out to Sikh Community… by Converting Them | Home | Recent Comments | Categories | Plane crash video from inside cockpit »
NASA Calls It A Mission As Curiosity Rover Fills Up Whole 2-Gigabyte Memory Card
[Quote]:
Barely 72 hours after the landing of its Mars rover, NASA officials announced Thursday that their mission had ended, as Curiosity’s two-gigabyte memory card was now filled to capacity. “Well, that’s that, folks,” said chief scientist John Grotzinger, explaining that after Curiosity’s Mars Descent Imager took an especially high-resolution JPEG of the Aeolis Mons mountain, the $2.5-billion rover’s SanDisk card only had 0.03 GB of space remaining. “Honestly, we thought two gigs would be more than enough. That’s like a 1,000 pictures, right? I guess we probably should have deleted those old Hubble photos off there before the mission.” Grotzinger confirmed that even if the rover had been equipped with a larger memory card, it likely would have had only enough power for a few more hours of exploration before it had to return to Earth to have its battery recharged.
|
Ok John. The Onion is definitely one of my favorite sites, but let’s give NASA a break, OK? This has been an awesome achievement. At 40mbps to download the images to Earth, that’s only 400 seconds (about 6 1/2 minutes) in real time. Then they can click another 2GB of images and data. So, assuming they are always in range of the Earth, or an orbiting platform, they can take almost real-time HD video… :^)
Way back in the good old days, there was a Dutch comedian who did a show on the evening of Dec 31th, reminiscing about the political year. Only after being mocked by him did politicians consider themselves to be important enough. It’s the same with the Onion. The fact that they make this joke means that Curiosity is a big deal.