The surprising panoramic photo of Mars taken by the …

The ChemCam laser camera, which NASA designed so that the rover Curiosity analyze rock chemistry March caught a surprising a panoramic photo from Mount Sharp, where the mission is located. The image reveals several geological landforms, such as a field of sand waves near the Vera Rubin Ridge, and an impressive array of stratified units.

The panoramic was taken during the recent ‘Housedon Hill’ imagery campaign, which the NASA mission team planned over two months. In addition to being impressive, the image captured at the “Mary Anning” drill site set a record, as it is the largest mosaic ever obtained with the ChemCam Remote Microimager (RMI).

The RMI was originally designed to document small areas analyzed by ChemCam’s Laser Induced Failure Spectroscopy (LIBS) technique in rocks within meters of the rover. During Curiosity’s first year on Mars, it was recognized that thanks to its powerful optics, RMI could also move from microscope to telescope status and thus play an important role as a long-range reconnaissance tool. . The device obtains black and white images from a circular “telescope” typical of a small region.

RMI complements other cameras quite well, thanks to its very long focal length. When put together, RMI mosaics reveal the details of the landscape several kilometers from the rover and provide images very complementary to orbital observations, which allows for a more human earthly perspective, explained in a press release Stéphane Le Mouélic, specialist in remote analysis at the Laboratory of Planetology and Geodynamics (LPG) of Nantes (France) and scientist on the Curiosity mission.

From July to October 2020, Curiosity remained stationed in the same location to perform various rock sampling analyzes. The team in charge of the mission took the opportunity to target very remote areas of interest, building a Steadily growing RMI mosaic between September 9 and October 23 which eventually became 216 overlay images. Combined, they make up a panorama of 46 947 x 7260 pixels, which covers more than 50 degrees azimuth along the horizon, from the lower layers of Mount Sharp on the right to the edge of “Vera Rubin Ridge” on the left.

The insets show how the high resolution obtained by RMI reveals several geological landforms, such as a sand wave field near Vera Rubin Ridge, and an impressive array of stratified units. All of these features highlight the complex geological history of Gale Crater. Mount Sharp has a prominent “marker bed,” a distinctive single layer that can be traced almost the length of its base, spanning tens of kilometers. It appears in this mosaic as a dark layer which marks a key change in the formation of the slopes of the mountain.

By contrasting the image in the middle of the panorama on the foreground, you can even recognize features corresponding to boulders that have rolled halfway up the wall of Gale Crater. When measured using images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (CTX) pop-up camera, these blocks are 59 kilometers from the rover, a record distance for a ChemCam / RMI observation.

This is the equivalent of seeing the buildings of a city about 55 kilometers away. This indicates that despite the dust in the atmosphere, which varies greatly with the seasons, the sky at that time was clear enough to take such distant images.