HDTV mission footage

cDelta · 2004-07-01 11:17:28

Recent probes such as the MERs and Cassini have returned some breathtaking imagery from the surface and orbit of other worlds and the public is eating it up. NASA's Mars websites have been inundated with people and I'm sure the returns from Cassini will be just as popular. However, with recent advances in compression such as MPEG-4 and H.264 (http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/h264.html) and solid-state storage technologies, when will someone have the sense to include a high definition video camera on one of these missions? I am aware that these missions have tight bandwidth and weight requirements, but the truth of the matter is that the public does not get excited by data sets. People get excited by multimedia.

At the recent Aldridge Commission hearings, many people testified that in order for the new Vision to work, the American public needs to own it. They need to be excited by it. I'm sorry to say that in a world of DVDs and HDTV broadcasts, the low quality video currently seen sent down from the ISS on occasion (the recent spacewalk, etc.) is not good enough. How compelling do you think high-quality footage of orbital insertion or landing would be? How amazing would it be to see a human set foot on the surface of the Moon or Mars at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels? This footage could be used directly for so many purposes - science museums, documentaries, Hollywood productions. Of course, it would be expensive to design custom hardware for such a purpose, but I believe the benefits to public perception would far outweigh the associated costs and technical difficulties. Remember the deal NASA had with Dreamtime a few years back, before the company went under? Is anyone aware of similar arrangements at the present time?

Thoughts?

(Also, what ever happened to that lunar lander, for the life of me I can't remember the name or company, that was supposed to return HD footage from the lunars surface?)

Rxke · 2004-07-01 12:24:08

Have you seen picture of the IMAX (or is it hdtv) camera they have onboard the ISS? It's freaking huge... And that is in the pressurised environment... Now imagine how big it would be if designed for vacuum... It wouldn't fit in the current Mars rovers, I'm afraid...

It will come, eventually. But space is a harsh environment. The compressiontechniques need fairly powerful processors, wich are not yet space-rated, same thing with mass-storage... And of course, the energy required to run everything. In outer space energy is at a premium, so everything is designed to conserve as much power as possible. For instance, the whole Cassini craft, big as a bus, uses less energy than a modern desktopcomputer...

etc etc...

Rxke · 2004-07-01 12:29:26

Oh, and you probably mean http://www.transorbital.net/]transorbital

Hmmm... In my book, i voted for them in the category 'most static webpage of the year'

It's eerily silent, though they keep their banners up at hobbyspace, spacedaily etc, so they're still in the running i guess...

cDelta · 2004-07-01 12:52:33

Transorbital! Yes! That's the one. But you are definitely correct about it being the most static page. However, the company must hold some water if Hewlett-Packard is investing in it - see http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press … 5a.html]HP iPAQ Pocket PCs to be Onboard TransOrbital's First Commercial Moon Mission

As for the IMAX camera, a digital HD cam and IMAX camera are different beasts all together. The IMAX camera uses very large film stock, whereas a digital HD cam would use solid state storage. So, the size for HD could be considerably smaller than IMAX. Granted, as you mentioned, storage and power (electrical and computational) are still issues to overcome, but I am sure that given enough resources...

Rxke · 2004-07-01 13:35:08

Yup... IMAX is what, 70mm or something... (or 35... I should know this by heart, shame on me!)

Sigh. Yes: given enough recources.

We'd be on Mars, manned, given enough recources...

But let's look at it positively: Cassini is about 7 yrs old, so it's old computer-tech (and hardware) compared to what we have now, even w/o taking into account all the rad-sielding issues etc. Current state-of the art cpu's, fit for space are at least a factor or two more perfomant, so there's hope for the next generation of probes!

(Of course if we could magically cobble together a state of the art 'spaceworthy' computer today, MPEG4, h.264, 5GHZ, 12Gb memory, DVD-writer, HDTV capturecard and camera etc... And send it to Jupiter... Seven years later it will be looked upon as a piece of old tech, heehee!)

Cobra Commander · 2004-07-01 13:42:15

As for the IMAX camera, a digital HD cam and IMAX camera are different beasts all together. The IMAX camera uses very large film stock, whereas a digital HD cam would use solid state storage. So, the size for HD could be considerably smaller than IMAX. Granted, as you mentioned, storage and power (electrical and computational) are still issues to overcome, but I am sure that given enough resources...

Quite right re. the IMAX. It uses 70mm anamorphic film stock actually, very big, very expensive.

Digital HD cams on the other could be probably be outfitted for space use fairly quickly. Already there are small HD camcorders, though I'm not sure if they've hit the general market yet. If we decide that we need that sort of imagery for PR purposes the hardware really isn't a huge problem. Transmission bandwith on the other hand might be.

Another concern is light. HD on Mars is fine. HD around Saturn gets much more iffy. With such low lighting levels there's really only two ways to compensate, use long 'exposure' times or boost the gain of the camera. One blurs images, the other makes them grainy. Either could negate the entire point of sending HD cameras in the first place. Bad video looks bad, but bad video in HD is atrocious.

cDelta · 2004-07-01 13:46:19

Yeah, IMAX is 70mm - 35mm is the standard film size. (It's okay, I had to look up the standard film size just now - you gotta love Google).

Given enough resources, we'd have floating O'Neil colonies in orbit AROUND Mars :;):. We can dream, can't we?

And actually, Cassini started development back in the '80s, so who can really say when they froze the design specifications. It could be running with a chip from 20 years ago! Oh, the horror! In all seriousness, how long does it take to get something 'space approved'? How difficult is it to radiation-harden something and given NASA's new mission, shouldn't getting advanced, reliable computer systems on the spacecraft be a priority? (I know, Apollo had less computing power than a 4-function calculator)

You know, you've got me thinking about my first computer now. I can remember it like yesterday. It was 25mhz (a 286) with a 5 megabyte hard drive...it ran DOS and :gasp: Windows 3.0! Oh, and the 5.5" floppy - when the disks really were floppy! I'm sure others will cite older systems, but hey, I'm only 19

cDelta · 2004-07-01 13:49:46

Cobra,

Another concern is light. HD on Mars is fine. HD around Saturn gets much more iffy. With such low lighting levels there's really only two ways to compensate, use long 'exposure' times or boost the gain of the camera. One blurs images, the other makes them grainy. Either could negate the entire point of sending HD cameras in the first place. Bad video looks bad, but bad video in HD is atrocious.

Light with a digital image sensor, like on those small handheld HD cams you mention, is even more of an issue. As exposure times increase, there is heavy image degradation, especially with those 'hot spots' that timed exposures on consumer digital still cameras produce...

As for bandwidth, I recall hearing about a laser communication system under development for future Mars orbiters and possibly JIMO. It's under consideration for JIMO primarily because of its high power requirements, since JIMO will be powered by a fission reactor. Does anyone know anything about the bandwidth of such a comm. system?

Cobra Commander · 2004-07-01 13:55:07

Light with a digital image sensor, like on those small handheld HD cams you mention, is even more of an issue. As exposure times increase, there is heavy image degradation, especially with those 'hot spots' that timed exposures on consumer digital still cameras produce...

Precisely, anything we do to compensate for low lighting is going to have adverse effects on the final image, in which case we might be better off using lower resolution cameras to begin with. Why capture and transmit an HD image that ends up looking like it was shot on a webcam?

EDIT::

You know, you've got me thinking about my first computer now. I can remember it like yesterday. It was 25mhz (a 286) with a 5 megabyte hard drive...it ran DOS and :gasp: Windows 3.0! Oh, and the 5.5" floppy - when the disks really were floppy! I'm sure others will cite older systems, but hey, I'm only 19

Since you mention it, an Apple II plus with a whopping 48K of RAM.

Rxke · 2004-07-01 14:00:06

Since I'm 34, my first one was a real old 'un, and I started early (I was one of those nerds, back when having a computer at home was something like errr... Well, really 'loser' stuff...

I still occassionally chuckle, when i remember an outcry of mine, yeeeeears later, when someone with loads of money i knew bought him a 1gig HD...

In essence i laughed at him, saying such capacity was ridiculous.
It was, at the time, before widespread internet access, mp3's DVD-rippers (and bloatware, of course) etc... It took him *years* to fill it up

Gotta love Moore's law, i say...

BTW: A belatedly warm welcome on New Mars from me, cDelta!

(EDIT:) An appleII run our school's administration and was considered something as a super-computer by me )

Rxke · 2004-07-01 14:05:03

Low-light also really screws up your performance cq compression too, the increased noise is bad news for mpeg etc...

(old joke: if you filmed grassy plains, withh the first gen digital cams, it was a pixellated mess, because of the 'randomness of the scenery... Hence someone dubbed MPEG: 'Motion Picture Except Grass'...)

cDelta · 2004-07-01 14:05:25

It's funny that you should mention the webcam. After I posted questioning our lack of HD footage, I immediately thought of a webcam and asked, "wouldn't any footage be better than none? - which is what we currently have.

Maybe NASA could include something similar to the http://www.eclipticenterprises.com/prod … ]RocketCam that was mounted to the side of Space Shuttle and the MER rockets during their launches a year or so back. It transmitted nearly all the way to orbit. It couldn't be that difficult to store and transmit at a later time...

Cobra Commander · 2004-07-01 14:13:18

Maybe NASA could include something similar to the RocketCam that was mounted to the side of Space Shuttle and the MER rockets during their launches a year or so back. It transmitted nearly all the way to orbit. It couldn't be that difficult to store and transmit at a later time...

This might be practical, a small camera that can capture anything of interest, compress the footage and send it back at an optimal time, rather than trying to stream it live. Not as nice to look at, but still I'd like to see it. But again, probably only good for the inner planets. Maybe some sort of image-enhancement could be used, but then you're dealing with abstracted images. Jupiter via nightvision goggles of a sort.

Unless of course we can make cameras significantly more sensitive than we currently have, in which case we're back in business.

Either that or we just have to send people. An HD camera and a few space-gaffers with bigass lights should do it.

cDelta · 2004-07-01 14:24:17

Send people? I'm available. How about you guys?

Cobra Commander · 2004-07-01 14:29:38

Send people? I'm available. How about you guys?

:laugh: Is the shoot catered?

cDelta · 2004-07-01 14:32:26

Of course it will be catered! Only the finest freeze dried food available and as for the the steak-in-a-tube, all I can say is dee-licious!

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#1 2004-07-01 11:17:28

Re: HDTV mission footage

#2 2004-07-01 12:24:08

Re: HDTV mission footage

#3 2004-07-01 12:29:26

Re: HDTV mission footage

#4 2004-07-01 12:52:33

Re: HDTV mission footage

#5 2004-07-01 13:35:08

Re: HDTV mission footage

#6 2004-07-01 13:42:15

Re: HDTV mission footage

#7 2004-07-01 13:46:19

Re: HDTV mission footage

#8 2004-07-01 13:49:46

Re: HDTV mission footage

#9 2004-07-01 13:55:07

Re: HDTV mission footage

#10 2004-07-01 14:00:06

Re: HDTV mission footage

#11 2004-07-01 14:05:03

Re: HDTV mission footage

#12 2004-07-01 14:05:25

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Re: HDTV mission footage

#14 2004-07-01 14:24:17

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#16 2004-07-01 14:32:26

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