rover

DJI Patented a Camera ‘Vehicle’ that Looks like a Mini Mars Rover

Chinese drone company (and Hasselblad owner) DJI may be bring their ambitions back down to Earth, literally. A newly discovered patent granted to the company shows a land-based vehicle with a camera and gimbal mounted on top—sort of like a pared down version of one of the Mars rovers.

Mars Rover Opportunity Commemorates 10 Years on Mars by Sending Home a Selfie

When the Mars Rover Opportunity landed on our planetary neighbor on January 25th, 2004 it was undertaking a three-month mission. Well, it's a full decade later and the little guy is still alive and kickin' (in a robotic kind of way).

And what better way to celebrate that achievement then by taking a good ol' fashioned, 2014-like selfie?

Video: NASA Gives a Tour of the Cameras on the Mars Curiosity Rover

The Curiosity Rover has been trekking the surface of Mars since late last year, and so far, there has been no shortage of great imagery.

But what gear is behind those intriguing images we see so frequently? NASA JPL has put together a short video on the camera equipment on board the Curiosity rover.

Nine Month Time-Lapse of Photos Taken on Mars by the Curiosity Rover

NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover has sent down a constant stream of images from the Red Planet. Ever since it landed on August 8th, 2012, it's spent every spare moment snapping selfies, panoramas and surveillance footage, and sending it back home from between 33.9 and 250 million miles away (depending on the relative positions of Mars and Earth).

The majority of Curiosity's photos that get picked up by the press are taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager and Mastcam, but Curiosity is actually taking pictures each and every day. Equipped with Front Avoidance Hazard Cameras or "Hazcams," the rover has been snapping black-and-white images ever since it landed, and one YouTuber has decided to stitch all of those images into a time-lapse.

An Arm’s-Length Self-Portrait Captured Millions of Miles Away

Facebook users here on Earth aren't the only ones shooting arm's-length self-portraits: NASA's Curiosity rover over on Mars is doing it as well! Curiosity captured the image above a couple of days ago using its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), which is attached to an extendable robotic arm. The image is actually a composite of 55 separate photos shot using the 2-megapixel RGB color CCD camera.

Footage of Curiosity’s Descent onto Mars Interpolated to 25 Frames per Second

NASA's Curiosity Rover snapped photographs at 5 frames per second as it descended onto the face of Mars a few weeks ago. The footage that results when the images are combined into a 15 frame per second HD video is pretty amazing, but apparently not amazing enough for a YouTube user named hahahaspam. He spent four straight days taking the 5 fps footage and interpolating it to 25 frames per second. This means that instead of a video showing the choppy landing at 3 times the actual speed, his video shows the landing smoothly and in real time!

Why the Mars Curiosity Rover’s Cameras Are Lame by Today’s Standards

Ever since NASA's Curiosity rover landed on Mars and started beaming back photographs earlier this week, people have been wondering, "why are the photos so bad?" The criticism seems merited: consumers these days are snapping great high-res photographs using phones that cost just hundreds of dollars, yet NASA can't choose a camera with more than 2-megapixels of resolution for their $2.5 billion mission?

In an interview with dpreview, project manager Mike Ravine of Malin Space Science Systems -- the company that provided three of the rover's main cameras -- explains that there were a couple main reasons behind the "lame" cameras: data transfer and fixed specifications.

First Color Photo of Mars by the Curiosity Rover

After shooting black-and-white landscape photos for a day, everyone's favorite Martian robot photographer is now dabbling in color photography. NASA's Curiosity rover beamed back its first color photo today, showing the rim of its new crater home.

How NASA’s Curiosity Rover Will Shoot Photos of Mars

NASA's Curiosity rover landed on Mars this morning with much fanfare here on Earth. The photo above is one of the first photographs snapped by the rover and beamed back to Earth. Captured through a fisheye wide-angle lens, the landscape photo hows a gravel field in the foreground and the rim of the Gale Crater (the rover's new home) in the distance.