Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps

xattt

Hopefully, the footage is better than the missed pan up at lift-off, and showing spectators at the time of booster separation. I understand funding cuts and all, but this is a once-in-a-generation moment and it’s filmed with no apparent effort whatsoever.

SoftTalker

> never-before-seen views of “the far side of the Moon“ I guess not counting all the prior "views" that have been recorded since the Apollo missions, including Chinese orbiters which (according to Wikipedia) "scanned the entire Moon in unprecedented detail, generating a high definition 3D map that would provide a reference for future soft landings"

vibe42

NASA's rendering of the flyby: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a005500/a005536/a2_fly... Hope we get to see something like this in 4K !

bnchrch

This in particular warmed my grumpy heart after the best footage of the launch came from a commercial airliners windows. I had assumed they would've had a better plan to film the entire departure from orbit yesterday. I'm at least happy they have one for the loop around the moon.

brcmthrowaway

How does laser communication work with a moving object with 9DoF?!

yardie

A reminder that the illegal DOGE took a chainsaw to NASA personnel last year. If you're disappointed that the feed update wasn't as polished as a SpaceX launch it's because the later has an actual communications and marketing department with a budget.

Gagarin1917

Why does the article keep mentioning footage “from the surface of the moon”?

Cider9986

> "will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps..." > "will be used to beam 4K moon footage at up to 260 Mbps." > "Data rates of 260 Mbps can be achieved..." I wonder what size stream will be available to us. The largest I see in general is 70-90 Mbps for a 4k Bluray Remux and that includes lossless audio. I imagine they would want as much data as possible—significantly more than would be visible to the human eye.

ethanmacavoy

the writeup is helpful but i'd want to see how it handles edge cases

jascenso

260 Mbps for 4K seems to be awfully a lot for a single stream. Really makes me wonder what has been used for compression ...

ck2

Didn't Nokia put a 4G cell node up there? Who is going to be the first to make a smartphone call from the moon? Lag won't be too bad, just 1.5 seconds or less

danny_codes

Hopefully it’s not cloudy

saltybytes

Forgive my bluntness asking this question: how hard can it be to put a stationary "satellite" as a communication relay next to the moon to bridge the "dark window" with the space craft?

egberts1

Still want to know what happened in first 10 second of launch, why were the videos fuzzy and cutting out (at least twice)????

runnr_az

How accurate does the laser have to be to hit the base station?

1970-01-01

The Alan Parsons Project is going 4K?

johnea

What a cluster fuck 8-/ This is how we spend billions of $ and accomplish, nothing. But, at least we'll have 4K, hi-res, laser beam, video of accomplishing nothing. And, we can all look forward to spending even more billions to do nothing on Mars! WTF?!

screenshotapi

This is amazing. This is a slow burn but live view from Orion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RwfNBtepa4

ra

Artemis II live location: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis-ii/arow/

goodthink

With all of the big deal being made about viewing the far side of the moon, you would think they would have performed the mission when the moon is _new_ so the far side would be illuminated...