So when will NASA do a live broardcast as the rovers get ready to crest over the cluster of hills, Never ... cause they feel it is not in there best interest too or possibly get people again involved like they did in the 60's... I for one hope not. The opportunity that awaits for us all to see first hand a live feed would be great from the pan camera as it takes it's first look. Good publicity na.. they would rather give us sound bites of what they think is good or cool.
Wouldn't it be funny to see a martian starring into the camera saying April Fools ha ha ha.

Ive always been a huge supporter of more live television from our space probes Harold. From the publics vantage point, we used to televise the moon missions, now all we get a still pictures. Seems like a step back to me. NASA needs to take the fact that they are a public supported organization seriously. Taxpayers pay for their missions, yet they do nothing to get the public's intrest. Yet when it comes time to request a budget increase, they scratch their heads and wonder why there is no support. People dont want to look at pictures of rocks and dirt, cause lets face it, unless theres something going on it is VERY boring. People want to feel like they are there. NASA needs to start equiping its missions with live cameras and microphones. Hmmm, 20 more years till we know what the wind on Mars sounds like I guess. Sad.

Thats providing that the funding for the mission is not cancelled under the guise of it does not fit into the then version of the SEI or that the president in office after Bush does not cancel the whole thing all together. Thank you Zach, for the fresh thoughts, the site started to look like the Harold comment page the last few days. Visit the sister site for more stuff on the SEI vision as well. Please everybody make some noise to those in powerful positions.

Guys, I agree with you. NASA is doing extremely bad job for exiting there own public. Not to speak about the people that doesn’t have interest about space. Have you had a chance to watch NASA TV lately? It is like a very bad Disney channel. Whole day, the same kids over and over. This is a non sense! The kids at this age don't want to be astronauts, they want to be firefighters. Even the real astronauts maybe wanted to be firefighters at age of 5. And who could possibly want to be an astronaut watching day after day the boring pictures from ISS. Apollo didn't need the Disney approach to inspire young people. Apollo was inspirational itself. Look at the Mars rover website. They will give you one picture for good morning and one picture for good night. At the same time they boast about 14,000 pictures sent back. Where they are? 25% of the daily information is about what was the awakening song of the day. What a stupidity! Somebody is paid a full job to search for titles that will hint about the daily activities. And this attracts who? The guys who are interested of this kind of "science" prefer to watch MTV.

Um, you do know that the rovers do not return actual video footage. It can send delay from images that can be dealt with like time-lapse photography. Getting phote footage of the rover going over a hill is physically impossible as well - the only cameras are on the rover, so there is no viewing of the rover itself.

What is video, it is a percieved picture by picture at a scan rate of a frame at approximate 60 hertz. I am sure the data processing rate is by far slower from the rovers. If Nasa can enhance a blurred image, I think they no how to remove the delays and simulate it as if it were live footage.