The first high resolution panorama it shows Mars rover perseveranceThe landing site offers a very detailed view of Crater Lake, including the jagged edge of the crater in the distance and low cliffs that mark the edge of an ancient river delta.
The panorama consists of 142 images captured by the Mastcam-Z camera instrument over the weekend, three days after the rover’s dramatic landing.
Click on the image below to enlarge and explore the landscape.
The dual-zoom camera system is mounted on a remote sensing pole and is capable of rotating 360 degrees to provide color and 3D panoramic images. It is able to detect something as small as a housefly across a football field.
“I have it all,” the rover’s Twitter account reported Wednesday. “This is the first 360-degree view of my house with Mastcam-Z.”
Perseverance landed last Thursday in a crater that once contained a body of water the size of Lake Tahoe. Billions of years ago, water entered the crater through a channel that ran along the edge of the crater, depositing sediment in a wide delta formation as it filled the crater to a depth of hundreds of feet.
Water disappeared about three billion years ago, but sediments could contain preserved remnants of ancient microbial life. Perseverance was designed to collect promising rock and soil samples that will be deposited on the surface for recovery by another rover later this decade. The samples will be launched into orbit to be captured by a European spacecraft that will do so bring them back to Earth for a detailed analysis.
NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU / MSSS
The Mastcam-Z panorama overlooks the crater floor, showing the steep edge of Jezero in the distance and eroded cliffs that mark the edge of the delta formation. There are friction marks nearby where rocket exhaust feathers hit the surface Perseverance was pursued until the touchdown for his jet pack “sky grue”.
“We’re stuck in a sweet spot, where you can see different features similar in many ways to the features found by (the previous rovers) Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity at their landing sites,” said lead researcher Jim Bell of the Arizona State University. ASU operates Mastcam-Z in collaboration with Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego.
NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU / MSSS
One of the goals of the initial imaging campaign is to identify relatively flat, stone-free areas where a small helicopter, still connected to the rover’s belly, can be left to test whether flight is possible in the thin Martian atmosphere. .
The first test flights are expected to take place in about two months.