Rover’s Eye View of Three-Year Trek on Mars

By Ben on October 25, 2011 at 3:26 am | In Blog Posts | No Comments

not as smooth as other rover movies but still nice.

–Ben

Three years on Mars … in 3 minutes

By Alan Boyle

It’s been a long, lonely three years for NASA’s Opportunity rover, which has just finished a 13-mile (21-kilometer) trek from Victoria Crater across the Martian wasteland of Meridiani Planum to Endeavour Crater. A newly released time-lapse video from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory condenses the odyssey down to just three minutes.

The video draws upon a series of 309 images, each taken when the rover stopped driving at the end of a Martian day. The pictures give you a sense of the loneliness that an astronaut might feel while following in Opportunity’s wheel tracks. Drifts of sand go on for miles and miles, interrupted only by craters or patches of bedrock.

The soundtrack for the video was created by taking low-frequency recordings from Opportunity’s accelerometers and speeding them up by a factor of 1,000. “The sound represents the vibrations of the rover while moving on the surface of Mars,” Paolo Bellutta, a roer planner at JPL in Pasadena, Calif., said in NASA’s video advisory. “When the sound is louder, the rover was moving on bedrock. When the sound is softer, the rover was moving on sand.”

More at:

http://tinyurl.com/6dltlch

aka:

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/11/8274228-three-years-on-mars-in-3-minutes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj4e2FyNFIE

GLORIA

By Ben on October 19, 2011 at 11:17 am | In Blog Posts | No Comments

sounds interesting.

Also interesting no US partners.

–Ben

What is GLORIA?

GLORIA stands for “GLObal Robotic-telescopes Intelligent Array”. GLORIA will be the first free and open- access network of robotic telescopes of the world. It will be a Web 2.0 environment where users can do research in astronomy by observing with robotic telescopes, and/or analyzing data that other users have acquired with GLORIA, or from other free access databases, like the European Virtual Observatory (http://www.euro-vo.org).

Who can access GLORIA?

The community is the most important part of GLORIA project. Access will be free to everybody who has an Internet connection and a web browser. Therefore it will be open not only to professional astronomers, but also to anyone with an interest in astronomy.

Which services will GLORIA offer?

Many Internet communities have already formed to speed-up scientific research, to collaborate in documenting something, or as social projects. Research in astronomy can only benefit from attracting many eyes to the sky – to detect something in the sky requires looking in the right place at the right moment. Our robotic telescopes can search the sky, but the vast quantities of data they produce are far greater than astronomers have time to analyze. GLORIA will provide a way of putting thousands of eyes and minds on the problem. GLORIA is intended to be a Web 2.0 structure, with the possibility of doing real experiments. The community will not only generate content, as in most Web 2.0, but will control telescopes around the world, both directly and via scheduled observations. The community will take decisions for the network and that will give “intelligence” to GLORIA, while the drudge work (such as drawing up telescope schedules that satisfy various constraints) will be done by algorithms that will be developed for the purpose.

How will GLORIA face its challenges?

GLORIA project will define free standards, protocols and methodology for:

1. Controlling Robotic Telescopes: and all related instrumentation i.e. cameras, filter-wheels, domes, etc.
2. Giving Web access to the Network: access to an arbitrary number of robotic telescopes via a web portal.
3. Conducting On-line experiments: It will be able to design specific web environments for controlling telescopes for research in some specific scientific issue.
4. Conducting Off-line experiments: It will be able to design specific web environments for analyzing Astronomical meta-data produced by GLORIA or other databases…

http://venus.datsi.fi.upm.es/gloria/index.php/en/