Author Topic: Does Cassini take videos?  (Read 3861 times)

Offline rings001

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Does Cassini take videos?
« on: 02/15/2017 12:06 pm »
Does Cassini take videos?

I was looking on nasa.gov and only saw the latest photos of the rings from January 30, no videos. Are there videos? you would probably see much more detail and texture with videos.

Online DaveS

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Re: Does Cassini take videos?
« Reply #1 on: 02/15/2017 12:14 pm »
Does Cassini take videos?

I was looking on nasa.gov and only saw the latest photos of the rings from January 30, no videos. Are there videos? you would probably see much more detail and texture with videos.
No. It only have still cameras in the way of photography equipment.
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Offline rings001

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Re: Does Cassini take videos?
« Reply #2 on: 02/15/2017 01:18 pm »
So how did they take that video of the  pentagon shape storm?

Offline DatUser14

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Re: Does Cassini take videos?
« Reply #3 on: 02/15/2017 01:20 pm »
Probably a bunch of stills in sequence, gifed.
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Offline ugordan

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Re: Does Cassini take videos?
« Reply #4 on: 02/15/2017 01:32 pm »
As a general rule of thumb, Cassini's 1 megapixel cameras can take 1 full frame per minute and maybe 1 frame every 20-ish seconds if it's 2x2 binned. A good part of the 1 minute time is due to the telemetry rate toward the solid state recorder.

Any video you see posted is either timelapse or tweened to smooth the motion between discrete frames.
« Last Edit: 02/15/2017 01:33 pm by ugordan »

Offline ThereIWas3

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Re: Does Cassini take videos?
« Reply #5 on: 02/15/2017 01:36 pm »
Radiation-hardened computers as are used on such probes, even with heavily shielding, use technology that is quite slow compared to your average smartphone.  And the data link back to Earth is a bottleneck.  But unless you are in an extremely low orbit, like ISS above Earth, the scenery does not really change that quickly so you aren't missing anything.

Offline ugordan

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Re: Does Cassini take videos?
« Reply #6 on: 02/15/2017 01:44 pm »
Radiation-hardened computers as are used on such probes, even with heavily shielding, use technology that is quite slow compared to your average smartphone.

Yes, but that is oversimplifying things. The Galileo orbiter, which was some 10-20 years older technology than Cassini was able to capture frames through its 800x800 camera in much more rapid sequence. The irony is it was probably able to give better high res coverage during close Galilean moon flybys than Cassini due to this *and* the inclusion of a scan platform, but it struggled actually getting all that data back to Earth due to the HGA failure. Cassini also had more instruments operating that were all competing for the solid state recorder bandwidth allocation.

It's all a matter of engineering and cost tradeoffs.
« Last Edit: 02/15/2017 01:46 pm by ugordan »

Offline IRobot

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Re: Does Cassini take videos?
« Reply #7 on: 02/15/2017 03:01 pm »
Does it make sense to have a 60fps video of Saturn?

No. At that scale, you will not see any difference between frames. A time lapse sequence of several minutes or hours is enough.

A video camera is designed to provide as much fps as possible, not caring much if they are properly done and acquired.

A scientific camera is designed to get a single image as good as possible. That means all the exposure parameters must be correct, the readout timers must be precise, the data transfer to the computer must not contain errors or skipped information, among other precautions.
Not only that, the ADCs for CCD readout usually run at very low speeds to reduce noise.
« Last Edit: 02/15/2017 03:03 pm by IRobot »

Offline catdlr

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Re: Does Cassini take videos?
« Reply #8 on: 05/03/2017 09:45 pm »
NASA: Cassini's First Fantastic Dive Past Saturn

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Published on May 3, 2017
As NASA's Cassini spacecraft made its first-ever dive through the gap between Saturn and its rings on April 26, 2017, one of its imaging cameras took a series of rapid-fire images that were used to make this movie sequence. The video begins with a view of the vortex at Saturn's north pole, then heads past the outer boundary of the planet's hexagon-shaped jet stream and continues further southward.



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Offline jgoldader

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Re: Does Cassini take videos?
« Reply #9 on: 05/04/2017 10:28 am »
And let's be fair, while Cassini is still a technological marvel, the electronics are more than 20 years old, the design even older.  We're not talking mSATA here.  And didn't Galileo have all kinds of issues with the tape recorder, which Cassini's solid state memory hasn't had?
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