Curiosity Snaps 'Arm's Length' Self Portrait 96
astroengine writes "Using its robotic arm-mounted MAHLI camera, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has snapped, quite possibly, the most iconic image to come from the mission so far. By stitching together 55 high-resolution photos, the rover has snapped an 'arm's length' self portrait, capturing its location in the geologically interesting area known as 'Rocknest,' including its recent scoop marks in the Martian soil and the base of Mt. Sharp." Note to NASA: Please sell this image in the form of a fundraising poster.
That's strange (Score:5, Funny)
I didn't know Curiosity was a teenage girl.
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Re:That's strange (Score:4, Funny)
Re:That's strange (Score:5, Funny)
Just needs the duck lips.
Re:That's strange (Score:4, Insightful)
And some more exposed circuitry.
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Some more eyeshadow and it'd be great on myspace
Where is the arm? (Score:5, Insightful)
Where is the arm that holds the camera?
Re:Where is the arm? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Where is the arm? (Score:5, Interesting)
True, but where does the arm attach to the rover? That end of the arm must be visible on any picture taking of that part of the rover. I am curious to see the individual parts, just to figure out how that part of the rover really looks.
Re:Where is the arm? (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently it is attached to the rover by the horizontal cylinder shaped appendix between the front wheels.
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/uploads/RTEmagicC_Msl-arm.jpg.jpg [thenakedscientists.com]
Also google for "mars curiosity arm" theres some really nice pictures there.
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there's a lot of exposed wiring and cabling. is that really the best way to do this? I would have thought that it would be safer to at least enclose in tubing or put the wiring inside hollowed out areas of the arm.
scrap that against a rock or have some rocks tumble on you and you lose wires.
am I missing some great wisdom here? or are those exposed wires a liability waiting to happen?
Re:Where is the arm? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd imagine you have several possible problems:
1. The protective casing breaks off. No different from laptops - what are the first parts to break? The small fiddly plastic bits like hinge covers, plastic connectors.
2. If an electrical circuit breaks or has a short circuit, how do you know where exactly if it is concealed by tubes and covers?
3. The extra casing would add more weight to the robot.
Normally, things like satellites get covered in layers of insulation, gold foil and shielding, but that is due to radiation and extreme temperature change.
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1. Weight.
2. Weight.
3. Complexity
4. Weight.
It's not like they're scraping the sides of Hell's Canyon in this thing. Nobody is careening into rock walls. I'm sure this was debated at length in engineering meetings. If you cover everything, then you can't see it (duh). Visual inspection is one of the strong points of the Rover so by making everything all aerodynamic you potentially cover a lot of useful information.
Besides, it looks cool this way. Very geeky.
Re:Where is the arm? (Score:5, Informative)
Top-left here [nasa.gov].
(Of note - the raw images got released quite a few hours before the official stitched version did. So a bunch of amateurs including myself [hylobatidae.org] and others [unmannedspaceflight.com] used various panorama-assembling software to assemble our own, unofficial stitched versions. Seeing Curiosity like this before pretty much everyone else was great...)
Re:Where is the arm? (Score:4, Informative)
Top-left here [nasa.gov].
Thanks! Now I see that the arm has indeed been removed by using other photos. And also in this place on the stiched photo there is a small inconsitency.
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Wondering what else I could do with the stuff I assembled in Hugin, I put together a quick interactive version of the panorama [hylobatidae.org]. Requires a recent browser with WebGL support - uses the open-source Pannellum [bitbucket.org] as the viewer.
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Awesome! Thanks :)
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Take a look at the high res photo:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA16239.jpg [nasa.gov]
In front of the corner of Curiosity closest to the camera, there's a dark grey cylinder with part faded out. Beneath, and slightly lateral to this you can see a motor which has had the top left corner diagonally cut out of it.
The arm was attached to this area, and that why as it rotated the picture here changed. It's the only place there are any major artefacts in the image.
Re:Where is the arm? (Score:5, Insightful)
This thing is going to get photoshopped to hell and back again.
Too many possibilities to ignore.
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I'm waiting for the one with Marvin [wikipedia.org].
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Yay, a new meme!
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It's a series of images that, when stitched, conveniently exclude the arm.
It seems to be excluding any shadow of any arm as well, The shadows for everything are plainly visible almost a straight down angle as if the sun is almost directly overhead... There's not even a shadow for an arm.
Re:Where is the arm? (Score:4, Insightful)
Look again. Follow that structure straight down the middle of the image to the bottom visible wheel, see how it casts a shadow? Now follow up towards the 10 O'clock position and suddenly there's a bit of that structure with a shadow and yet nothing above it? That's the support for the camera.
Re:Where is the arm? (Score:5, Interesting)
You can see shadows from the turret on the end of the arm in a couple of the raw images [nasa.gov]. Whoever planned the arm manoeuvres did an incredible job - not only did the arm itself almost completely disappear in final stitched versions, the images have very little parallax despite the arm very much not being a proper panoramic camera mount.
Of note - there was a second [nasa.gov] set of images taken - very similar to the first, but with a small horizontal offset. Likely result? 3D versions of the panorama!
The only thing I want now is, perhaps in a year or so, a full 360-degrees spherical panorama of the rover parked near some interesting cliffs or other geography. Go on, NASA - do it! ;-)
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> It's a series of images that, when stitched,
> conveniently exclude the arm.
Good one for public relations, NASA.
Reminds me of that scene from M*A*S*H where Father Mulcahey grows corn all year and, after harvesting, the army cook turns it into creamed corn.
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A martial is holding the camera
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It was taken by a local who, as he left, was heard muttering 'Tourists....'
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Check out the image to conventional portrait [wikimedia.org] of Curiosity in the Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org]. You'll see there is a robotic arm mounted on the front of the rover that does not appear in the self portrait.
If you think of the robotic arm as analogous to a human arm, it has a pair of motors at the "shoulder" (for two axes of motion), one at the "elbow" and another pair at the "wrist". In the self portrait only the "shoulder" of the arm is visible -- you can see one of the motors (which looks like a pair of stacked black
Hot, hot, hot (Score:3, Funny)
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As soon as my daughter is born, I'm gonna name her Curiosity. Thereafter, our boy will be named Mars, so she can roll all over.... Oh, wait.
Families that play together, stay together...
What a co-incidence!!! (Score:5, Funny)
To the Mars natives, Curiosity is known as the "Rocknest Monster"
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at least 2 large green men were heard uttering "this was not born here. can you find its manufacturing certificate, anywhere? there's only the short panel of text on the side, we need to see the longer version."
yes, 'doubters' on mars are really big and heavy.
that's why we call them girthers.
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New In Town!
Self-sufficient adventurous type seeks casual encounters. I've been out on my own for a while now, have a serious, analytical side, but a warm heart. I still write home to my parents every day. Would love to send them photos of me with my new friends. Don't be shy! I don't bite -- I just vaporize little rocks out of curiosity.
--Rocknest Monster
Also funny on Mars linked from that article (Score:2)
Thirty-five megapixel version (Score:5, Informative)
5463 x 7595 pixels (width x height) [nasa.gov]
Re:Why are there footprints... (Score:5, Informative)
Those are the little trenches where it was scooping soil samples.
Re:Why are there footprints... (Score:5, Funny)
Those are the little trenches where it was scooping soil samples.
Hand in your conspiracy theorist badge. Now. They can be nothing but footprints. Little trenches from scooping soil samples... hilarious.
Re:Why are there footprints... (Score:5, Funny)
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Hold the fort!
I've done some more careful analysis and this is truly incredible. If you add the height of each Giza pyramid, convert the image to greyscale with each pixel having a value of 0-0xffff, add those values to the original image, mask with 0xffff, rotate by the circumference of the Great Pyramid, project the 2d greyscale image to 3D with an eye distance of -1 you get this [blogspot.com]. No joke.
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I must have chosen different Laplace transforms. I see "Paul is dead", backwards.
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Cool pic though.
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Yep, obviously taken in San Bernadino county.
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Not only that, but if you look in the lens of what looks like a camera on the tallest part of the rover, you can clearly see the shadow of the person taking the photo.
So far away (Score:2)
but it looks like it could be any arid/desert landscape on Earth.
And no I'm not suggesting conspiracy. :)
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Except for the color of the sky, and presumably the color of light hitting the rover.
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Note to Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
Please don't don't try to 'sell' page hits. Use the source [nasa.gov]...
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Why not?
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I'd rather not have my bandwidth and CPU cycles consumed by advertising, which also clogs the tubes all around the internet. It causes my music streaming to break up and slows down my torrents.
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I agree that it's better to link a primary source rather than some watered-down news site or blog. But I don't see them selling links here, just not bothering to track down the original source. Slashdot editors barely even read the submissions they post, never mind editing them for commercial purposes.
That arm going to be handy (Score:1)
Can anyone say.... (Score:1)
We all know what's really out there (Score:3)
robot (Score:1)
Gotta love how no efforts to pretty it up ends up making it look really cool.
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The information is free. You can download the bits no charge. But if you want a high quality print on good paper, that's another story.
higher resolution? (Score:2)
Is there a higher resolution available somewhere? I want to use it on my desktop.
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Is there a higher resolution available somewhere? I want to use it on my desktop.
Linked from the bottom of the page in TFA: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA16239 [nasa.gov]
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There is no image of the camera, but just the body of the rover and its surroundings.
You can do the same thing yourself by taking a a few of images of yourself with your arm bent in different directions (ie, elbow forward, elbow back) while still keeping the camera in more or less the same place. You can then stitch them together and your arm will disappear. Or, you can make it look like you have multiple arms.
Thank Dog (Score:2)
No duckface.
Mission Critical (Score:1)
Glad to see NASA is not wasting one precious moment of this things limited lifespan on non mission critical tasks. Your tax dollars at work spending hours for scientist to send data to and from the thing and you get a facebook pose in return.
They've cropped something out. (Score:1)
Footprints?! (Score:2)
Are they...em...footprints?!
Group photo (Score:2)
Tracks... (Score:2)
What are the scientists doing? Donuts on Mars?