Not too shabby

we-are-star-stuff

Today marks the one-year anniversary of Curiosity's epic arrival on the surface of Mars. To celebrate, immerse yourself in every eye-popping detail of Curiosity’s harrowing plummet to the Martian surface in this ultra-high-definition video.

Independent video producer Bard Canning spent four weeks painstakingly reprocessing imagery released earlier by NASA showing the rover’s near-perfect descent as captured by its onboard Mars Descent Imager (MARDI), a downward facing camera.

The original imagery, 297 frames, was compiled by NASA into a video that shows the rover’s final two-and-a-half minutes of a 14-minute, hair-raising descent that involved an abrupt 14,000-mile-per-hour to zero slowdown. The rover began capturing the imagery just before it ejected its heat shield, which can be seen in the first few seconds of the video.

Canning used a video processing technique known as motion-flow interpolation, which involves creating new frames to fit in between existing frames, increasing the overall frame rate from the original, which was just 4-frames-per-second, and making the video appear more fluid at 30 frames-per-second. He also enhanced the color and the detail of the imagery and re-rendered it at “enterprise-quality 1080p, 50,000 kbps (instead of the usual ~1000kbps).”

“I manually added thousands of motion-tracking and adjustment points,” Canning wrote of his process on Reddit, “I had to go the laborious manual route because the frame-rate is too low causing the footage to jerk around too quickly for automated motion tracking to handle it.”

On top of everything, Canning added something that other Mars descent videos have lacked: sound. Simulating the rover’s booming entry from space into the high atmosphere and then the quieter whooshing winds of Mars as it was lowered on its supersonic parachute really adds to the realism of the video.

Canning said he contacted NASA about the video, and that several people involved with the mission have gotten back to him, one who even requested to use it in NASA marketing material.

To get a nice behind-the-scenes look at Canning’s process, he has helpfully provided a “making of” video.

[via TPM]

spaceplasma

Lightning comes in more flavors than you can shake a metal rod at—positively or negatively charged, headed up or down, hitting the ground or another cloud. Atmospheric scientists know that ice particles in a thundercloud become slightly charged. Eventually, a negatively charged layer of the storm gets sandwiched between two positives. Electricity arcs among the layers, ionizing the air and making it glow. But experts have yet to understand the bolts’ behavior. Researchers are now tracking the radio waves and x-rays produced by lightning, and they’re even experimenting with synthetic strikes (made with rockets!). Here’s their current thinking.

Gigantic jet: About 80 percent of all storm discharges are intracloud. But if one heads up and hits a weak positive charge in the upper layer, it exits skyward.
Bolt from the blue: Gigantic jets can exit the cloud sideways and touch down miles away from the storm that spawned them under a clear blue sky.
Spider: These discharges travel up to 60 miles per second over huge distances, moving laterally through horizontal layers.
Beaded: Certain segments of the kinked ion channel seem to glow brighter when seen from a particular angle.
Forked: When too much negative charge builds up at the end of a bolt, its channel can split apart in midair to form two or more offshoots.
Ribbon: Multiple strikes sometimes share the same channel. If the wind blows the channel sideways, the eye perceives a band of light in the microseconds between strokes.
Zigzag: As a storm dissipates, air between the cloud and the ground holds pockets of charge. This produces bolts that hop groundward from one pocket to the next.
Ball: Grapefruit-sized, glowing spheres of electricity have been reported in the vicinity of thunderstorms. No one knows why.
Energetic narrow bipolar: These intracloud flashes are one of the strongest natural source of radio emissions. They last only 10 microseconds.
Red sprite: Positively charged cloud-to-ground lightning makes the cloud more negative. That negative field reaches upward above the cloud, where lower air densities mean less energy to produce a discharge—which then glows red.
Blue jet: According to one theory, negatively charged cloud-to-ground lightning makes the cloud more positive; the storm pumps the excess positivity skyward in a high-energy burst that makes the ionized air around it glow blue.