Mars images rendered in 4K [video]

[nobrains]

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)

[cryptoz]

Mars is constantly moving. There are wind storms, dust devils, ice melting, all kinds of things.

Here's a dust devil https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8lfJ0c7WQ8 (again, it's still images to make a video) but not because "nothing ever moves on Mars"!

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.

[nobrains]

References:

(1) https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/5874/opportunitys-rub-al-kha...

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rub%27_al_Khali

(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namib

(4) https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/slip-face-on-downwind...

[jerf]

"There is a beautiful selfie at timestamp 6:41"

Where's the camera in that selfie? Perhaps edited out of the mosiac?

[TravHatesMe]

> named after the Rub Al Khali desert area

> named after Namib desert in Africa

In a few hundred years, maybe these won't be deserts anymore. It will make for an interesting fact!

[majora2007]

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.

[shakezula]

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.

[kyriakos]

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.

[johnyzee]

I believe the images are quite aggressively recolored and cleaned up. The narrator states that the original images would be reddish and hazy.

[rement]

Devon Island is where many people train to work on Mars missions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzyOdH6OlV0

[MR4D]

Maybe I’m missing something, but isn’t this just the Ken Burns effect? [0]

Calling it “video” may be technically true, but lees interesting than Google Street View (which is not video, but more interactive).

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Burns_effect

[magnetic]

In my youtube quality menu, it only goes up to 1080p.

Is this really 4K?

[rwmj]

I downloaded it with youtube-dl because I cannot stand the excessive adverts on Youtube these days. During the download it grabbed this video file:

  Input #0, matroska,webm, from 'New - Mars In 4K-ZEyAs3NWH4A.f313.webm.part':
  Metadata:
    encoder         : google/video-file
  Duration: 00:10:08.41, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 4436 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(eng): Video: vp9 (Profile 0), yuv420p(tv, bt709), 3840x2160, SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9, 29.97 fps, 29.97 tbr, 1k tbn, 1k tbc (default)

So yes it's 4K.

[soylentcola]

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.

[lm2s]

I was experiencing that on Safari, then switched to Chrome and it now shows 4K.

[sgt]

In 9/10 cases you don't see the difference anyway unless you are actually on a very large screen and you don't mind wasting the extra computing power.

[rav]

For me, it lets me choose both 2160p(4K), 1440p(HD), and 1080p(HD).

[hellofunk]

I have a 4K option in the youtube menu.

At one point in the video, there is a 1.8 million pixel image where they discuss and show zooming into the image while preserving detail.

[zmk_]

If you are trying to watch this on a phone then the YouTube app is limiting the maximum resolution to the resolution of your phone.

[cbsmith]

For me, YouTube is doing 2160p.

[Zealotux]

Goes up to 4K for me, are you on mobile?

[throwawaysea]

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.

[greenhacker]

I appreciate the accompanying geologic info on various sediment and structural explanations which is too often missing.

[hijp]

The narrator explains why getting HD video would be impractical, but I disagree that we get the same experience from panning stills.

imagine seeing the swirling dust, shifting sands, the bumps and parallax from a moving rover. that would be so cool!

[mcast]

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."

[nabla9]

Very little shifting sands.

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.

[cpayne624]

Parallax, maybe, but no wind = no swirling dust or shifting sands, no?

[aeyes]

> The narrator

It's a machine.

[hnarn]

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?

[jml7c5]

Spirit and Opportunity: https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/multimedia/images/ (raw: https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/multimedia/raw/ )

Curiosity: https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images (raw: https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw-images )

[SV_BubbleTime]

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.

[coldcode]

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.

[oscarpaz]

My first video post and didn’t add the required [video] suffix to the title. Just realized about it, apologies.

[dopeboy]

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?

[tsak]

But only for 8 minutes according to the voice over. Which would come down to 960MB in an ideal scenario (2 MB/s * 8 * 60s).

[ridaj]

Looks like Utah...

[coldcode]

Looks like the Atacama Desert in Chile, which is where NASA tests Mars things.

[huhtenberg]

Erm... is that a puddle of liquid @ 1:53 or am I seeing things?

https://youtu.be/ZEyAs3NWH4A?t=113

[martin-adams]

It does look there's ripples in it, but I suspect that it's a pattern made from the winds and the angle of the light causing the smooth effect

[vagab0nd]

There's a bird-shaped rock at 7:57 [0]

0: https://youtu.be/ZEyAs3NWH4A?t=477

[bawana]

What was that blue sand made of? The rover left orange tracks so i guess it was use a dusting of something. Ice?

[amelius]

Is there any "360 degrees" content, that can be viewed with VR goggles?

[sabujp]

can't wait until they find a trilobyte or horseshoe crab looking fossil