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Originally Posted by lakerslive
hmmmm because it would be hard to edit out the anomalies.. just a thought
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Do you have any concept of how long it takes a radio signal to reach Earth from Mars and how fast (slow) the data transfer speed is.
It's very expensive in terms of resources to make videos from the cameras of rovers and use valuable bandwidth to send those back when in the same time many photographs of greater detail could be taken along with the associated instrument analysis accompanying the subject of the photograph.
Moving data through the solar system is SLOW because of the vast distances involved and the need for error correction. It takes about .2 of a second for a single ping on the Internet to go from Melbourne to Los Angeles and back again.
In the case of mars it takes up to 26 minutes for a ping to go over the Deep Space Network (DSN) from Earth to Mars and back again.
So depending upon the distance from Earth to Mars (this changes) for every packet of data sent from Mars to Earth there is 13 minutes for the packet to be received and another 13 minutes for an ack to be sent back. If the data sent is corrupted somehow and it needs to be resent then that process needs to be repeated.
Now obviously the DSN doesn't just send single packets back and forth, it's more parcels of information, but the same principle applies.
With all that said, NASA do take video from both rovers and their orbiting counterparts, but it's of things which are of specific interest like storm formations or atmospheric changes that can be recorded on video in either the visible or infrared spectrum. These do exist on the NASA website.