The Perseverance Rover has had a chance to settle on Mars since landing on Thursday, so it does what every new resident does these days – sending back photos of his 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 color zoomable cameras, returned 142 images of its landing site on February 21st. NASA teams sewed them to create the first 360-degree panorama of the instrument.
This is the first high-definition image of Jezero crater, the site of a 3.9 billion-year-old white lake, where the rover will look for signs of ancient life for the next two years.
In the image, the edge of the crater and the cliff of an ancient delta of the river can be seen in the distance. It’s no different from the images previously shared by NASA’s Curiosity rover on its Gale Crater exploration site.
“We are nested even in a sweet place, where you can see many similar features in many ways with the features found by Spirit, opportunity and curiosity at their landing sites,” said Jim Bell, principal investigator of the Mastcam-Z instrument at the School of Arizona State University Earth and Space Exploration in a statement.
Perseverance sent back a panorama using its navigation cameras or navigation cameras over the weekend.
Mastcam-Z is a new feature of Perseverance, which is based on lessons learned from the Curiosity rover’s Mastcam tool. The Curiosity Mastcam has two cameras with a fixed focal length, while the Mastcam-Z has the ability to zoom.
These two cameras are like high-definition eyes on Perseverance, as they share their point of view with a team of scientists and home engineers.
They sit on the mast of the rover, reaching eye level for a person who is a little over 6 and a half meters tall. The cameras are at a distance of 9.5 inches to allow stereo viewing.
The color images produced by Mastcam-Z are very similar to the quality you would expect from your own HD digital camera, NASA officials said. These cameras can not only zoom in, but also focus on capturing videos, panoramas and 3D images.
This will allow scientists on the mission team to examine objects that are both near and far from the rover.
In the panorama, details from 0.1 to 0.2 inches can be seen if an object is next to the rover, while those between 6.5 and 10 feet 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 rocks that other rover instruments should study. The views offered by Mastcam-Z will also help scientists determine from which rocks they should collect evidence that will eventually be returned to Earth by future missions.
The team working on the Mastcam-Z tool will share more details about the panorama on Thursday, February 25 at 16:00 ET on the NASA website and on social media accounts.