The Perseverance Rover has had a chance to settle on Mars since landing last Thursday, so it does what every new resident does these days – return photos of its new home.
In this case, it’s a steady stream of amazing images from another planet.
The rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument, a pair of zoomable color cameras, returned 142 images of its landing site on February 21st. The teams at NASA put it together to create the instrument’s first 360-degree panorama.
This is the first high-definition look at Jezero Crater, the site of a 3.9 billion-year-old dry multi-bed where the rover will search for signs of ancient life for the next two years.
In the photo, the crater rim and the rock face of an old river delta can be seen in the distance. This is no different from images previously shared by NASA’s Curiosity rover of its Gale Crater reconnaissance site.
“We are located in a lovely place, where you can see different features that are in many ways similar to features found by Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity on their landing sites,” said Jim Bell, lead researcher on the Mastcam-Z instrument at Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, in a statement.
Perseverance also sent back a panorama over the weekend using its Navcams, or navigation cameras.
Mastcam-Z is a new feature on Perseverance that builds on lessons learned from the Curiosity rover’s Mastcam tool. Curiosity’s Mastcam has two cameras with a fixed focal length, while Mastcam-Z has the zoom capability.
These two cameras are like a high-definition eye on perseverance, while sharing her views with a team of scientists and engineers at home.
They sit on the machine and reach eye level for a person who is just over six and a half feet tall. The cameras are 9.5 inches apart to enable stereo vision.
NASA officials said that the color images produced by Mastcam-Z are very similar to the quality you would expect from your own digital HD camera. These cameras can not only zoom, but also focus on capturing videos, panoramas and 3D images.
This will enable scientists in the mission’s team to investigate objects that are both near and far from the rover.
In the panorama, details as small as 0.1 to 0.2 centimeters can be seen when an object is near the rover, while those between 6.5 and 10 feet in the distance are also visible.
These capabilities will help the general objectives of the mission to understand the geological history of the crater and to identify the types of rock that the other instruments of the Rover should study. The views offered by Mastcam-Z will also help scientists determine from which rocks they should collect samples that will eventually be returned to Earth by future missions.
The team working on the Mastcam-Z instrument will share more details about the panorama on NASA’s website and social media accounts on Thursday, February 25 at 4pm.