Mars rover beams rear panoramic view of landing site

The first high-resolution panorama showing the Perseverance Mars roverthe landing site offers a remarkably detailed view Crater lake, including the jagged rim of the crater in the distance and the low cliffs marking the edge of an ancient river delta.

The panorama consists of 142 images captured by the Mastcam-Z camera over the weekend, three days after the rover’s spectacular landing.

Click on the image below to zoom in and explore the landscape.

The zoomable dual camera system is mounted on a remote sensing mast and is able to rotate 360 ​​degrees to provide full color and 3D panoramic images. He is able to detect something as small as a house fly along the length of a football field.

“I take everything into account,” the rover’s Twitter account reported on Wednesday. “This is the first 360 degree view of my house with Mastcam-Z.”

Perseverance landed Last Thursday in a crater that once housed a body of water the size of Lake Tahoe. Billions of years ago, water entered the crater through a channel running through the rim of the crater, depositing sediment in a large delta formation as it filled the crater to a depth of several hundred feet.

The water disappeared about three billion years ago, but the sediment may contain preserved remains of ancient microbial life. Perseverance was designed to collect samples of promising rocks and soils that will be deposited on the surface for recovery by another rover later this decade. The samples will then be put into orbit to be captured by a European spacecraft which bring them back to earth for a detailed analysis.

The Mastcam-Z panorama looks out over the crater floor, showing the craggy rim of Jezero in the distance and the eroded cliffs marking the edge of the delta formation. Scour marks nearby where rocket exhaust plumes hit the surface as Perseverance was lowered to the touch with its “sky crane” jet pack.

“We’re tucked away in a great place, where you can see different features similar in many ways to the features found by (the former rovers) Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity on their landing sites,” said lead researcher Jim Bell of Arizona State University. ASU operates Mastcam-Z in conjunction with Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego.

One of the goals of the initial imaging campaign is to identify relatively flat, block-free areas where a small helicopter, still attached to the rover’s belly, can be dropped off for testing to determine if the flight in the thin Martian atmosphere is doable.

The first test flights are expected in about two months.