Research by three scientists from the Haifa Technion made the transmission of video pictures from Mars by the NASA explorer "Spirit" possible, according to HP (Hewlett Packard) Labs, which was responsible for the image transmissions.
The ability to transmit the images was feasible thanks to a unique algorithm developed by Technion graduates living in the US as a continuation of work launched by two other Technion professors a quarter of a century ago.
Shortly after landing on the surface of the red planet earlier in the week, NASA's explorer began sending black-and-white photographs of Mars' rocky surface back to Earth, 106 million miles away. The sparkling clear images have been called "remarkable" by NASA officials and amateur astronomers.
The achievement was made possible by highly efficient data compression. "Because of the great distance between Earth and Mars, the signals are very weak, thus data can be transferred very slowly. Thus the way to speed it up is to compress the data and translate it into another form with many fewer bits without harming the quality of the image," Ziv explained. "NASA adopted the algorithm originally developed by our graduates, who are the second generation of our original work."
