Mars 2020 landing! 2/18/2021 (Earth, light, rover, sound)
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To expand upon what Dane said, you can’t see anything in real time as there’s always a delay. Light travels at a finite speed. When you look at a monitor in front of you or a distant mountain, you see it as it was in the past. However, since everything on Earth is nearby (relatively speaking), that distance is negligible (we’re talking about things like nanoseconds). In space, distances scale up rather quickly, so that the planets in the outer solar system are several light hours away (meaning you’d see them as they were x number of hours ago). Once you get to stars and galaxies, you’ll be seeing them as they were y number of years ago (with distant galaxies those figures go to the billions).
his high-resolution still image is part of a video taken by several cameras as NASA’s Perseverance rover touched down on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021. A camera aboard the descent stage captured this shot. A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust). Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (the European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these cached samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis. The Mars 2020 mission is part of a larger program that includes missions to the Moon as a way to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance and Curiosity rovers.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/n...f-mars-landing
his high-resolution still image is part of a video taken by several cameras as NASA’s Perseverance rover touched down on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021. A camera aboard the descent stage captured this shot. A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust). Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (the European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these cached samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis. The Mars 2020 mission is part of a larger program that includes missions to the Moon as a way to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance and Curiosity rovers.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/n...f-mars-landing
Love to see this video from which the still image is taken here. When looking at the pic of the Mars landscape and others from the earlier missions it sometimes looks as if it could be Southwest USA. It is just amazing we can view these images of another planet.
Mars is about 126,000,000 miles from Earth at the moment. Light (and radio signals) travel at about 186,000 miles per second. Doing the math, that's 677 seconds from Mars to Earth, or 11.29 minutes.
So when you go out and look at Mars in the sky, the light you see left Mars almost 12 minutes ago. Moonlight left the Moon about 1.3 seconds before you see it.
To expand upon what Dane said, you can’t see anything in real time as there’s always a delay. Light travels at a finite speed. When you look at a monitor in front of you or a distant mountain, you see it as it was in the past. However, since everything on Earth is nearby (relatively speaking), that distance is negligible (we’re talking about things like nanoseconds). In space, distances scale up rather quickly, so that the planets in the outer solar system are several light hours away (meaning you’d see them as they were x number of hours ago). Once you get to stars and galaxies, you’ll be seeing them as they were y number of years ago (with distant galaxies those figures go to the billions).
It's fascinating to realize that light moves so fast, it took us several centuries of careful observation to realize it had a speed at all. Ole Rømer - not just from my old country, but from my old city, Aarhus - was the first to measure what he called "the hesitation of light" in 1675, when the moons of Jupiter didn't eclipse as per schedule.
NASA is going to release video of the landing today at 2PM EST, should be EPIC!
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