The first high-resolution panorama that shows Rover’s Perseverance on MarsThe landing site offers a remarkably detailed view of Crater Lake, including the notched edge of the crater in the distance and the low cliffs that mark the edge of an old 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 zoomable dual camera system is mounted on a remote sensing mast and is capable of rotating 360 degrees to provide panoramic and 3D color images. It is able to detect something as small as a fly along a football field.
“I’m taking everything,” the rover’s Twitter account reported on Wednesday. “This is the first 360-degree view of my house using Mastcam-Z.”
Perseverance has landed last Thursday in a crater that once held a body of water the size of Lake Tahoe. Billions of years ago, water entered the crater through a channel that cut through 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 preserve preserved remnants of ancient microbial life. Perseverance was designed to collect promising samples of rocks and soils that will be deposited on the surface for recovery by another rover later this decade. The samples will then be launched into orbit for capture by a European spacecraft that will do so bring them back to Earth for detailed analysis.
NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU / MSSS
The Mastcam-Z panorama overlooks the crater floor, showing in the distance the cracked edge of Jezero and the eroded rocks that mark the edge of the delta formation. Nearby cleaning marks where rocket exhaust panels hit the surface Perseverance was lowered to the touch through the “sky crane” jet package.
“We are nested even in a sweet place, where you can see various similar features in many ways with the features found by (previous rovers) Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity at their landing sites,” said State University Principal Investigator Jim Bell from Arizona. . ASU operates Mastcam-Z in collaboration with Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego.
NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU / MSSS
An objective of the initial imaging campaign is to identify relatively flat areas, without boulders, where a small helicopter, still attached to the rover’s belly, can be left to test to determine if flying in the thin martial atmosphere is feasible.
The initial test flights are expected in about two months.