The Perseverance rover has had a chance to move to Mars since it landed last Thursday, so it’s doing what every new resident does: send photos of their new home.
In this case, it is a constant flow of amazing images from another planet.
The rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument, a pair of zoomable color cameras, returned 142 images from its landing site on February 21st. NASA teams teamed them up to create the first 360-degree panorama of the instrument.
This is the first high-definition look at Jezero Crater, the site of a 3.9 billion-year-old dry lake bed, where the rover will look for signs of ancient life for the next two years.
In the image, you can see in the distance the edge of the crater and the face of the cliff of an ancient river delta. It doesn’t look like the images previously shared by NASA’s Curiosity rover from its exploration site in Gale crater.
“We’re locked in a sweet spot, where you can see different features similar in many ways to the features found by Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity in their landing sites,” said Jim Bell, principal investigator of the Mastcam-Z instrument at The Arizona State University School of Earth and Space Exploration, in a statement.
Perseverance also sent a panorama with its navigation cameras or navigation cameras over the weekend.
Mastcam-Z is a new Perseverance feature based on lessons learned from the Curiosity rover’s Mastcam instrument. Curiosity’s Mastcam has two cameras with a fixed focal length, while Mastcam-Z has zoom capability.
These two cameras are similar to perseverance in high definition, as they share their vision with a team of scientists and home engineers.
They sit on the rover’s mast, reaching eye level for a person who is just over 6 and a half feet tall. The cameras are 9.5 inches apart to allow stereo viewing.
The color images produced by Mastcam-Z are very similar to the quality you might expect from your own HD digital camera, NASA officials said. These cameras can not only zoom in, but can also focus on capturing video, panoramas, and 3D images.
This will allow scientists on the mission team to examine objects that are near and far from the rover.
In the panorama, details up to 0.1 to 0.2 inches in diameter can be seen if an object is close to the rover, while those between 6.5 and 10 feet away are also visible.
These capabilities will help the overall objectives of the mission both in understanding the geological history of the crater and in identifying the types of rock that the rover’s other instruments should study. The opinions offered by Mastcam-Z will also help scientists determine from which rocks they should collect samples that will eventually be returned to Earth for future missions.
The team working on the Mastcam-Z instrument will share more details about the scene on Thursday, Feb. 25 at 4 p.m. ET on the NASA website and social media accounts.