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(CNN) – The Perseverance rover has had a chance to settle on Mars since it landed last Thursday, so it’s doing what every new resident does these days: submitting photos of their new home.
In this case, it is a constant stream of amazing images from another planet.
The rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument, a pair of zoom color cameras, sent 142 images of its landing site on February 21. NASA teams put them together to create the first 360-degree panoramic image of the instrument.
This is the first high-definition panoramic image captured by the Perseverance rover’s Mastcam-Z 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, the crater rim and cliff of an ancient river delta can be seen in the distance. It is no different than the images previously shared by NASA’s Curiosity rover of its exploration site in Gale Crater.
“We are located in an ideal place, where you can see different features similar in many respects to features found by Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity at their landing sites,” Jim Bell, principal investigator of the Mastcam-Z instrument at the NASA said in a statement the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University.
The rim of the Jezero crater can be seen in the distance.
Perseverance also posted a panoramic image using their Navcams, or navigation cameras, over the weekend.
Mastcam-Z is a new Perseverance feature that builds on lessons learned from the Mastcam instrument on the Curiosity rover. Curiosity’s Mastcam has two cameras with a fixed focal length, while Mastcam-Z has zoom capabilities.
These two cameras are like high-definition eyes on Perseverance as you share your point of view with a team of scientists and engineers at home.
They sit on the mast of the rover, reaching eye level for a person who is just over 6 feet tall. The cameras are 9 inches apart to allow for stereo viewing.
The color images produced by Mastcam-Z are very close to the quality expected from an HD digital camera, NASA officials said. These cameras can not only zoom, but can also focus to capture videos, panoramas and 3D images.
This wind-carved rock can be seen in the first 360-degree panorama taken by the Mastcam-Z instrument.
This will allow scientists on the mission team to examine objects that are both near and far from the rover.
These capabilities will aid overall mission objectives both in understanding the crater’s geological history and in identifying the rock types that the other instruments on the rover should study. The views provided by Mastcam-Z will also help scientists determine which rocks to collect samples from that will eventually be returned to Earth on future missions.
The team working on the Mastcam-Z instrument will share more details about the panorama this Thursday, February 25 at 4 pm Miami time, on the NASA website and on their social networks.
