800Whrs+ Staying Up Late ideas Options

[djellison]

With Spirit producing an annoyingly large amount of power given her current predicament, the time may well have come to re-open the Gusev astronomy society. Anyone have any dusk / nightime observation ideas?

[imipak]

Well now, if we're talking goofball ideas... Astro0's evocative animation of the sunset especially reminds me that I've often wondered about the outreach potential of full-motion video. Of course, there are plenty of excellent reasons why video capture's not a requirement for present or any future lander, not least the fact that if nothing much moves... what do you film?

Well, actually quite a few things move or change their appearance relatively quickly. (That's evident from the many amazing animations posted here and elsewhere composed from still sequences.) The sun moves, of course, and the shadows cast by the landscape and rover itself. Those planets which are bright enough to be visible (more slowly.) The stars, and possibly other astronomical objects. Phobos and Deimos. Possibly orbiting spacecraft. Dust devils. Atmospheric phenomena - clouds, and dust clouds; possibly aurorae as suggested by nprev above. And (one day!) the whole landscape will move past Spirit itself.

So, how about shooting some sequences at a higher than normal rate? (e.g. , an hour of one image every 30s would make 5 seconds of 25fps "video".) Candidates might include DD movies, the moving scenery once Spirit gets back on the road, and personally I'd love to see an all-night sequence of the stars revolving across the sky. (That would require staying awake all night, which I guess would be too power-intensive even with 900 Whr?)

I have a hunch that a sequence composed of stills showed at 25 fps, even if nothing interesting is going on, would produce a more visceral, "real life" feel in viewers used to seeing the world on TV. Even a sequence where nothing moves but the noise on the CCDs would, I think, communicate something more immediate and direct about the statement "we have rovers on Mars" than still images alone.

I can see two obvious problems with this, apart from the obvious ("...but that's crazy. What's the point?"): storage space, and uplink bandwidth. No doubt there are many others!