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This summer, when NASA’s Perseverance rover launches, it will be equipped with the most advanced pair of eyes ever dispatched to Mars. The Mastcam-Z instrument in Perseverance has the next-generation zoom capability that will help the mission make 3D imaging easier. Rover drivers, the people who plan the driving route for the rover’s robotic arm movements, view these images through 3D glasses to discover the contours of the landscape.
Placed at the head of Perseverance, the Mastcam-Z is a more advanced version of the Mastcam in NASA’s former Curiosity rover. It is the Curiosity camera used to create stunning panoramas of the red planet. The Mastcam-Z will do all of that and more: it will produce images that people can see to follow the rover’s daily adventures and discoveries, but it will also provide key data to help engineers and scientists choose interesting rock fragments to study. Curiosity’s Mastcam couldn’t zoom, Mastcam-Z did.
However, Curiosity Mastcam was originally designed to be extensible. However, it turned out to be difficult to achieve at the time, 2011 when Curiosity launched, on such a small instrument.
“The original plan was for Curiosity to have a zoom camera that could extend to an extremely wide angle like a spaghetti western view,” said Jim Bell of Arizona State University, principal investigator for Mastcam-Z and principal investigator for Mastcam. .
“It would have been an amazing panoramic perspective, but it was very difficult to build at the time.”
The Curiosity Mastcam has a telephoto lens and a wide angle. Images are taken through each lens and can be combined to produce stereo views. But the wide-angle lens covers much more of the landscape in a single shot than the telescopic one; It requires up to nine telescopic images to match, explains the blog about the Mars Exploration Program.
The Mastcam-Z in Perseverance makes things simple, “zooming in and out on both lenses until they match and can be used to make a single 3D image.” This process is easier and requires sending fewer images and less data to Earth.
A 3D printed model of Mastcam-Z, one of the Mars 2020 rover’s scientific cameras. Mastcam-Z will include a 3: 1 zoom lens.
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NASA / JPL-Caltech
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In addition to providing a stereo view to help choose the safest path, “Mastcam-Z will help geologists choose scientific targets and better understand the landscape in which the rock samples are located: Did they fall from a neighboring cliff? Are they from an old stream?
The blog explains that Mastcam-Z will provide “superhuman vision,” “viewing the landscape in a variety of colors (wavelengths of light), including some that the human eye cannot detect.” “Scanning the terrain in ultraviolet or infrared, for example, could reveal metallic meteorites that dot the surface or color variations that indicate compositions that warrant more detailed analysis by other instruments,” the blog explains.
Bell’s first experience with images of Mars was when he was 11 years old, seeing images on the nightly television news reports sent by Viking landers in 1976. Mastcam-Z principal investigator later became involved in the Mars Pathfinder mission and led the Pancam Systems on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers.
This image presents a selection of 23 cameras from NASA’s Mars 2020 rover. Many are improved versions of the cameras on the Curiosity phone, with a few new additions as well.
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NASA / JPL-Caltech
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The views that Perseverance will send from its landing site, Jezero Crater, will be just as important to those who work on the mission and to everyone who follows it.
That is why there are plans to share Mastcam-Z images and mosaics made by the amateur community on a public website. “It is important for the public to have a sense of ownership. The Mastcam-Z images belong to us all,” said Bell.
