General > General Technical Chat
Mars rover perseverance live stream
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floobydust:
Computing power aside,  I can't see a BGA-packaged part in the drone surviving the temperature swings of Mars :-//
SiliconWizard:
Beyond the technical limitations... let's assume for a moment it was at all possible to do a live stream from Mars. I doubt the NASA would let that stream publicly for all to see, unattended...

There may be some critical stuff done during the mission that they don't want people to see, at least not in "real time" and before they would have processed the images as they see fit. There may be occasional mishaps (there always is!) that they wouldn't want the public to see either. Imagine how quickly things escalate on social media these days. That could literally ruin NASA's efforts and the public opinion. There may also be discoveries that they don't want to unveil immediately, etc.

That's just not going to happen even if some day that became actually feasible. Or they would control the streaming and would let it happen only under strict supervision and for limited amounts of time.

The day we have free live streams from cameras on Mars - it probably will be when we have already colonized it. If it ever happens, and if there are people left on Earth after that.
T3sl4co1l:
Eh, I doubt they would worry about it.  Astronauts can hardly take a piss without mission control having planned it out beforehand. :P Streaming video of a preprogrammed autonomous vehicle is about as close to "Reality TV" (read: scripted and/or heavily edited pseudo-organic drama) as it can get, eh?  Honestly, if something unexpected "slips" out in such a case, I'd think they'd be thrilled; it's an opportunity to spin it into real drama (a problem in need of a solution), or it's an opportunity to show the scientific process, a teachable moment (sometimes unexpected things happen; sometimes tools break, sometimes you discover aliens, you know, whatever).  Any producer would be thrilled to have their own microcosm of Apollo 13 (the movie), right?

Mostly though, it'd just be supremely boring... these are not powerful vehicles, travel is almost as fast as paint drying.  I mean, they can still give a schedule for expected highlights ("drill arm will be active tonight at X, check it out"..), and there'll always be a few people watching any time day or night, and sometimes they'll spot something odd and get some Internet Points from it.

Heck, maybe in say the next decade, we'll be far enough along that this sort of thing is actually feasible, who knows.  Or if not on Mars, then on the Moon surely, or when they get down to mining asteroids perhaps... :)

Tim
MikeK:
I remember seeing live stream of some shuttle missions - perhaps they were ones of Hubble repair.  They were boring as hell.  I don't know why many things need to be live streamed.
Brumby:

--- Quote from: MikeK on February 27, 2021, 01:11:52 am ---I don't know why many things need to be live streamed.

--- End quote ---

Because they are new, interest will be high - and that's when you want to service the demand in order to maximise public engagement.

The trouble is things get boring very quickly when you deliver the same sort of material over and over.  Take the movie Apollo 13 for example.  There is a scene before the explosion where the crew were doing a "live stream" and the TV channels were not running it.  Al that changed when the disaster happened, but until that point, it was rather hum-drum.


As mentioned (several times) above, the bandwith/distance/power elements make this a major challenge which is impractical - but even were we to develop such capability, the video stream is going to be very boring to the vast majority of viewers - very quickly.  Imagine a commentator saying, "Let's pan right to get a closer look at that rock - and then you have to wait half an hour (depending on Earth/Mars separation) to see that happen.  You ask for it now - but realities like this would sour your interest in very short order.

I am much more in favour of the experts managing the raw data and presenting a far more concise and meaningful piece of media that delivers the level of information we expect in a time frame we are used to.
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