

Ask HN: Why doesn't NASA live stream the Curiosity video feed? - hybrid11

Title says it all, wouldn't it be an awesome publicity stunt for NASA?
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jonhendry
Because it doesn't send live video back to Earth. It sends pictures to the
satellites that orbit Mars, which relay the data to Earth, and it only has
periodic contact with those satellites.

So I don't think it has the bandwidth for video. It'll probably be a fairly
slow data rate, more like a progressive GIF downloading.

I suppose it could record video, and send it back, but it wouldn't be real-
time.

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jonhendry
Here's an article about Curiosity's image capturing capabilities. It'll take
some pictures first thing when it lands, but we won't get them for about two
hours, because of the timing of the satellite orbits.

<http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-226>

