Interesting facts that I didn't know before seeing this video:
- The opportunity rover captured a barren scene which was named Rub Al Khali (Yes! On Mars!), named after the Rub Al Khali desert area which touches UAE, Saudi, Oman and Yemen. (1) (2)
- The video says that Mars rovers send back images (not videos) and then those images are stitched together to create videos, because "nothing ever moves on Mars". But I wonder how a Mars video will look. Maybe it will surprise us (movements due to winds).
- Mars has a lot of clay (i.e. it was once a watery planet)
- Some videos took 1,000 images to make
- There is a beautiful selfie at timestamp 6:41
- There is dune named "Namib" on Mars, shown at timestamp 9:10, named after Namib desert in Africa. (3) (4)
Mars is constantly shifting and changing with its weather and seasons. Ice caps freeze more, and ice caps melt more, water or other liquid flows down hills when it gets warm.
More often than dust storms, a new robot comes down to land on Mars in firey rocket-landing-fueled or bouncing-ball style. Movement.
Mars is constantly hit by rocks from space that create craters and push dust up into the atmosphere.
I've never heard someone say "Nothing ever moves on Mars" because it's really not true and a total lack of imagination. Maybe people think nothing moves because we haven't sent video cameras yet? But...Mars is constantly in motion.
Earlier this year I made a video[0] where I took two images which are frequently posted on reddit that show the movement of martian sand over a day and interpolated (with python and opencv) the movement into a smooth video. I'm currently working on restoring some Apollo footage, but one of the pending projects is taking the Curiosity descent sequence (at 4 frames per second) and give it a shot at some nice quality, XXI century interpolation (we have some very good algorithms now, or at least better workarounds the artifacts).
The creator on that channel simply uses a DAIN application without pre or post processing the images (either the base images or the optical flow maps).
I take a different approach and I can't say I haven't found issues (I have, many, I'm working on them).
My goal is to reach a level where there are almost none artifacts (there are a couple in that video at the start, when the shield is released and when there are many large movements of the camera due to Curiosity dangling off the parachute). As I said, I'm still working on it, and in between my other side projects, work and quarantine I've been on a less-than-ideal situation.
In time, if I pull it off, I'll post it and I guess you'll see it.
When something is quoted like that it usually means it's a reference to something, not a literal statement. In this case I'm guessing it's a play on "Nothing ever happens on Mars" by the Spinal Tap guy.
That's probably a great example of one of the benefits of these rovers running for so long. They'd never have scheduled something so non-science-oriented if they only got the few weeks they expected, but when your mission exceeds expectations by several thousand percent, you have time for such things.
A lot of people bashing on this, but I think overall it's pretty impressive just showcasing to more people what Mars looks like. I for one was impressed and enjoyed the panoramic effect.
Crazy to think Earth might eventually look like Mars.
Anyone bashing on this has absolutely no concept of the scales or engineering that went into this. When I look at these images, even though I've known we had them for a long time, I'm filled with a tiny bit of hope for the future, something I haven't had in all of 2020.
Some of the bashing is because of the over-the-top narration, and the script saying things that are borderline lies. It's not the first time this images have been seen. It's not the first time someone has rendered them in 4K video (I'm pretty sure Astrum and Scott Manley have used some of these images before).
When looking at the title at first I thought they had used an SR-GAN (or modern variant) to upscale the images. And no, they just took the images and pan over them. I wouldn't have liked the SR-GAN approach either, I'm not a fan of it (to me it trades accuracy for good looks, and it introduces some artifacts which, while harder to spot on video, are probably not really there).
Also others have pointed out that it seems like basically monetizing public domain images without putting some effort into it. Like another crows has pointed out, they do work into writing a script, the narrator, and editing the material, so that's not a take I like (and I'm also "in the same business" as them).
what impressed me more about this video is how earth like an alien world looks like. it may not have vegetation but there's nothing I wouldn't expect to see somewhere on earth.
The cameras on the rovers are not the same as the camera on your phone or a DSLR. Each camera has specific sensors for different wavelengths of light [0]. The images are really just the wavelength reflection intensity measurements (think of it like RAW images on a DSLR but for more than just RGB).
The colorization is done by taking several of these images for wavelengths and adding them together. For example blue is in the 450–495 nm wavelength, green 495–570 nm, and red 625–740 nm. The Mastcam on the curiosity rover is actually two cameras with various sensors for different wavelengths (including wavelengths outside the visual range). They can use these images to create color images. You take the 440 nm sensor and give each pixel a value between 0-255 and display that with more/less blue. Take the 525 nm or 550 nm sensor and make them green and the 675 nm sensor and make them red. When you combine these you get an image that looks pretty similar to what it would look if you were really there (It's called true color and false color [1]). This same process is used by satellites as well to measure and classify things on Earth from space. They way different surfaces reflect light in different wavelengths help scientists classify things on Earth and Mars and all over the solar system. (It's Okay to Be Smart on YouTube has a cool video about Infrared [2])
One of Curiosity's cameras has a Bayer Filter Array and practically shoots like a DSLR. You can download the (debayered) "raw" files which are simply 1408x1200x1 (channel, uint8) panes one under the other in RGB order. So basically an 8bit grayscale 1408x3600 image that you can open with GIMP in "raw image data (.data)" mode and fill in the data in the settings window.
But you are right that many times scientific missions will have monochrome CCDs with a filter wheel on top (Cassini, Galileo, Rosetta, Dawn to name a few).
Mine goes up to "2160p" but since the source photos are stitched together, I'm not sure what their total resolution would be (probably varies based on what/how many were stitched together).
It's basically some pans across high resolution composite images. Quite cool but not captured video. As they mention, there's not much moving there anyway but it will be cool when someday we can look at high def (or even stereoscopic) video from these remote locations.
You can get stereoscopic images from the Curiosity navigation cameras. You could do a much better job of correcting the lens distortion, but I made an example in 2012 (I decided to make the sky blue as a stylistic choice at the time, for which I was rightly criticized as Mars does not have a blue sky and people might think the images were from Earth): https://blog.mikebourgeous.com/2012/08/06/curiositys-view-of...
From Wikipedia regarding VP9[1]: "Parts of the format are covered by patents held by Google. The company grants free usage of its own related patents based on reciprocity, i.e. as long as the user does not engage in patent litigations."
Of course Apple refuses to add VP9; Google demands that Apple would never sue them over any patent. Any. It looks like Google/YouTube caved in, and has/will start encoding (the most recently uploaded) videos in AV1 codec, which will work on tvOS. Hopefully that will translate to Safari on macOS and iOS for those who use it.
If you're talking about a beautifully mastered Blu-Ray, then that might be true.
But given how aggressively YouTube compresses videos, watching in 4K can provide a huge improvement over 1080p even if your screen only has, say, 1,600 lines like my MBP does, instead of the 2,160 lines that 4K actually produces. It's really about the clarity of textures and how lifelike they are -- it's very noticeable. Of course, this also assumes you have good vision.
I also don't think anyone's too worried about "wasting computing power" here for a short video.
That's curious. My observation has been that most of the streaming services have really high compression ratios with 4k streams. With videos like this one, which are built from still images, I imagine you still get significant improvements in quality, but for content that isn't so easily compressible (e.g. action movies), I've seen significant effects from compression in 4k streams as compared to "regular" 4k source material.
As far as "wasting computing power"... I hear some people play video games while watching movies... on the same machine. So that's probably what that is about.
Because YouTube (like other streaming services) aggressively compresses both 1080p and 4K, but the 4K version still has a much higher bitrate, watching the 4K stream on a 1080p monitor will be significantly better quality than watching a 1080p stream on a 1080p monitor.
I'm not saying you won't see any compression artifacts at all, of course if it's an scene you will. But the 4K version is still noticeably way better than the 1080p one, even in an action scene. It's a higher bitrate so there's more detail no matter what.
Yeah, what I'm saying is that because the 4k streams are trying to convey more entropy than the 1080p streams, I've observed that even though their bitrate is higher, the resultant compression effects are far more severe, to the point where the overall experience is better with 1080p, sometimes even if you have access to the full 4k resolution. I've seen similar effects with audio content (after a certain point, increasing sampling rate significantly more than bitrate has a deleterious effect).
From an information theory perspective, you are obviously correct that there is more information in the 4k streams and therefore you will get more detail from them. My observation however has often been the opposite.
My attempt to rationalize leans towards notions that the lossy compression techniques we use with video codecs still have significant impedance with the "compression" in our neuro-opthalmologic system.
Oh now I understand what you're saying -- that makes sense. It's not what I've observed, but I definitely can imagine how settings for the compression, or what the algorithm concentrates on, could make that happen. I'll have to pay close attention now! And your rationalization probably makes sense -- I read the h.266 codec is supposedly focusing specifically on perception improvements in 4K/8K, so it may be addressing what your'e perceiving specifically.
Funnily enough, this reminds me of what I did with JPEGs on websites when Retina first became a thing. Instead of serving up different assets depending on resolution, I discovered that serving up a 2x resolution JPEG to everyone, with really crappy quality, was superior to serving up 1x with high quality. For 1x screens, blockiness was inherently shrunken because of JPEG's fixed block sizes, and for 2x screens the low quality was harder to perceive because it was at a small scale anyways. How compression interacts with scale/resolution is not a necessarily intuitive thing.
That's a brilliant conclusion on the JPEG hack, and yes, that's precisely what I've observed. You really notice it if you compare to even 1080i with high bitrates (OTA HD TV for example). It's weird.
I believe it's worth watching 4k even on a 1k monitor, because due to chroma sub-sampling there is actually information visible even at the lower resolution.
The music overlay really gives the video a nostalgic feel...even though I've never been to Mars.
For those who had the same question I had about whether these are actual colors, the narrator talks about the change in color between images and the color correction done in post-processing around 5:45.
Would be great to add a quality binaural microphone and listen to the sound of Mars.
Apparently the Mars 2020 Rover (https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/microphones) will have that capacity when it lands in February 2021 but the microphones may break after landing: "Engineers are optimizing this microphone for space from easily available, store-bought hardware. It is unlikely it will work beyond landing. If it does survive, we may be able to hear the sounds of the Martian winds and sounds of the working rover, such as the wheels turning, or the motors that turn its head, and the heat pumps that keep it warm."
Winds in Mars have almost no strength. Air pressure in the Mars surface is very low, something like 1% of Earths. Dust devils and storms are made of extremely fine powder.
The movement shown in this video[0] happened over the span of a martian day. Do not dismiss the winds of Mars, as they have also killed[1] a couple of rovers already.
[1] They have also breathed new life on one of those (before killing it, yes) by cleaning the solar panels. I'm referring to the MER Rovers Spirit & Opportunity.
As you said, that movement of was over a day and the camera was pointing downwards towards very tiny details of fine grained powder next to a wheel.
You wouldn't notice anything in real time video.
The problem with Mars dust is that it's electrostatic and sticks to surfaces like solar panels.
>It is unlikely that even these dust storms could strand an astronaut on Mars, however. Even the wind in the largest dust storms likely could not tip or rip apart major mechanical equipment. The winds in the strongest Martian storms top out at about 60 miles per hour, less than half the speed of some hurricane-force winds on Earth.
>Focusing on wind speed may be a little misleading, as well. The atmosphere on Mars is about 1 percent as dense as Earth’s atmosphere. That means to fly a kite on Mars, the wind would need to blow much faster than on Earth to get the kite in the air.
Strongest martian storm can have wind speeds up to 100 km/h. Because low air density, the force of the wind would be equal to "Fresh breeze" in Beaufort Wind Scale. (8.5-10.5 m/s) "Small trees sway, waves break on inland waters."
Of course, it's very weak, so it couldn't push over a spacecraft or building like in "The Martian", but I suspect sands shifts on a very slow timescale. I'm not sure.
I can't find a comment asking this yet, so I'll do it: where can I get the actual images, not in a video? I'm assuming these images are in the public domain?
I don’t know if it was a specific mission requirement to give the rover a camera that conveniently functions as a selfie stick, it’s pretty damn genius and gives the photos a lot of context and character.
Being able to see the geology this way is really interesting. Something made the channels you see, something ground the rocks down to a fine dust and even made that huge sand dune, something tossed all those rocks around. I always wonder if you drilled down 100 meters you'd find life of some kind.
Fascinating photos. I hope, sometime in my life, humans will be able to go.
If the rover can stream to the orbiter at 2mb/s, would it be possible stream video to the orbiter and have it save in its buffer? Then it'd transfer to Earth later on?
Is that megabits or megabytes? Usually lowercase denotes bits, so I think you'd divide that total data size by eight to get 120MB. With a good codec 2mbit/s is probably enough for low-motion SD or 720p video.
I'm not sure if panning through static photos Ken Burns-style from Mars qualifies as "Mars in 4K [video]". But I appreciate that it makes these stunning images more accessible to more people.
Does this video make them more accessible? It seems to make them less accessible. It's a video composed of readily-available images from https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images
This is a really cool video and I don't mean to detract from it, but seeing how its 10 minutes and 8 seconds long annoyed me so much (and not for the reason you think).
"10 minutes" is an ad milestone for videos on youtube. I systematically click away and hide videos that are between 10:00 and 10:20 minutes long: They'll almost certainly have been artificially slowed down to match the ad requirements.
It's infuriating, and once you know about it, you see it everywhere. Anyway, in this instance it matters a lot less as the audio is completely unimportant…
It's the minimum length of time a video must be in order to enable mid-roll ads.
The 10 minutes one seems pretty arbitrary, but to arrive at 8 mins I suspect that Google studies how much time there needs to be so that mid-roll ads don't negatively affect engagement.
(Shout-out to all the wonderful, brilliant engineers working on figuring out how to minimize the user's reaction to cramming AS MANY ADS as possible down their brain)
extremely recently, like a week ago or so, and this video was from 3 days ago; for the next few weeks I'm still going to look at the 10 min timestamp as more telling than an 8 min one (though I'm sure youtubers will "migrate").
Looking at the channel, 3 of its videos are between 10:04 and 10:09 long. Of course, that's nothing compared to a lot of other long-form youtubers I've seen with like 80% of their videos around that timestamp.
"As far as I can tell" by your comment, you did not watch the video. I didn't even finish half the video, and I stopped it just before the 2nd ad break started.
Yes, people should be able to complain about things that are annoying and damage their experience. In this case, 10 minutes is an arbitrary time and the OP is arguing that this arbitrary number for monetization results in poorer quality videos.
You act like they didn't invest time and energy to create interesting content (compilation, editing, professional voiceover, community building, etc)? This isn't public domain pictures reuploaded on a blog spam website with zero effort.
Not to mention spreading science wider through promotion is a valuable service to society. Not everyone browses nasa.gov sites. Nor does raw content always hit frontpage of HN.
- The opportunity rover captured a barren scene which was named Rub Al Khali (Yes! On Mars!), named after the Rub Al Khali desert area which touches UAE, Saudi, Oman and Yemen. (1) (2)
- The video says that Mars rovers send back images (not videos) and then those images are stitched together to create videos, because "nothing ever moves on Mars". But I wonder how a Mars video will look. Maybe it will surprise us (movements due to winds).
- Mars has a lot of clay (i.e. it was once a watery planet)
- Some videos took 1,000 images to make
- There is a beautiful selfie at timestamp 6:41
- There is dune named "Namib" on Mars, shown at timestamp 9:10, named after Namib desert in Africa. (3) (4)