The arrow identifying the position of the heat shield is WAY off – it doesn’t point to anything in particular that can be seen. Moreover, the sun angle that the implied position of the heat shield would have with respect to its shadow is inconsistent with the illumination angle apparent in the terrain, which has the sunlight streaming from upper right to lower left across the scene, not from the lower right, as implied by the false position of the heat shield pointed out by the arrow. Finally, the position indicated by the arrow implies that the sun angle CHANGES, rotating significantly during this brief sequence. The field of view in this highly-magnified section of the frames is far too narrow to show any perspective effect as seen from the descending rover.

I don’t know who is responsible for the bad arrow or the image analysis, but if its Malin Space Systems, its not very often they make a blunder like that.

And find it missing

Start counting the bits per second needed for even a 64×64 thumbnail which were the initial MARDI images. There were more important things that they needed to know in the last few seconds than a pretty picture from above. My guess is that during the time after the Earth was below Curiosity’s horizon, they were using the low gain antenna to communicate to the Mars Observer and the other two recording backups, that they not would want to waste time recording an essentially useless image.

Alternately, the sky crane could have recorded to a specialized USB stick that it dropped the moment the rover was down – if it had a radio transponder in the in the rover could have then picked it up and read the contents for leisurely transmission back to earth.

Man, you are making things complicated, as if the whole landing sequence was not complicated enough.

I know that every ounce is precious on these missions ….

The only reason I replied at all, is that I doubt that that was a consideration. If they ever considered a camera on the decent stage (will we ever know?) I suspect that the bandwidth budget was a much more important consideration than the mass budget.

George

Alternately, the sky crane could have recorded to a specialized USB stick that it dropped the moment the rover was down – if it had a radio transponder in the in the rover could have then picked it up and read the contents for leisurely transmission back to earth.

I know that every ounce is precious on these missions but as part of the mission is to inspire scientists on earth, I hope future missions proceed even further along the path of taking really cool images and video as part of the mission, and not just based on scientific need.

But not a problem, we have radar.

If you look at the even older Ranger (U.S moon probes which just hit at high speed) you again can’t really judge height.