It's awesome that they've been involving the public so much in the details of how the rover mission really works. I'd actually been wondering about this exact question, since it seems to be one of the limiting factors for the quality of images and such. From a physics standpoint, sending data is clearly a lot more complicated than I'd previously assumed.
> It's awesome that they've been involving the public so much in the details of how the rover mission really works.
It must be mission critical to spread awareness since their budget cuts are getting worse and one way to correct that is to get people excited about space exploration. They now put a considerable effort in PR, involving people in the mission, sharing most of the information and making professional videos. And i believe this is why we see twitter accounts of most astronomers, satellites, rovers and other NASA properties. The NASA's ustream has been very popular lately and they have presence on every major social network. And curiosity was named after an essay written by a student in a competition organised by NASA for school students.
Absolutely, this seems like one of the most amazing in a long string of incredible things. There’s only enough energy to power two 60w light bulbs, and yet it can transmit all the way to earth while also powering the computer running the thing.
This probably has more to do with the massive antenna (also known as a radio telescope) here on earth that are used to pick up the signal. Fortunately a few such antenna exist around the globe, so Mars should be in view of one of these antennas at all times. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Network), radio telescope complexes used by NASA are located at:
Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex near Barstow, California, USA
Robledo de Chavela near Madrid, Spain
Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex near Canberra, Australia
You'd be amazed what you can do just with a watt of radio power.
If a transmitter and a receiver is in space, what's the furthest distance the receiver can go away from and have a 1 watt signal still above the noise floor? Assume the transmitter is a perfect omnidirectional.
In general, space travel is very risky. It's not like they can iterate. Pulling something off like landing on Mars is very impressive. Keeping this in mind, I feel it was actually quite risky that NASA streamed the landing live.
I think NASA should receive big kudos for taking that real risk.
