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From NASA Perseverance rover gave us our best view of his Martian landing site.
The car-sized Perseverance captured a stunning 360-degree panorama of its surroundings on the floor of Jezero Crater, which was home to a lake and river delta billions of years ago.
The photo, which NASA released today (February 24), is made up of 142 individual images taken by Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z camera system on Saturday February 21, three days after the rover has landed.
Related: Where to find the latest Mars photos of the Perseverance rover
Live Updates: NASA Mars Perseverance rover mission
See the complete panorama
You can download Perseverance’s Full HD panorama of its Mars landing site from NASA here.
Members of the mission team had already assembled a Jezero panorama using images taken on Friday February 20 by Perseverance’s navigation cameras. But the high-definition Mastcam-Z has sharper eyes, so the newly unveiled photo is more striking and detailed.
The far edge of Jezero is visible in the new photo, as is a cliff that is a remnant of the old delta, NASA officials said. The new panorama is zoomable, so you can inspect these features – and others in the foreground, including the oddly “holey” rocks – up close in the full resolution version, which you can find here.
As the name suggests, Mastcam-Z rests on the head-shaped mast of Perseverance. The system consists of two zoomable cameras that can resolve features as small as 0.1 to 0.2 inches (3 to 5 millimeters) near the rover and 6.5 to 10 feet in diameter (2 to 3 meters) at far, NASA officials said.
Mastcam-Z is similar to the Mastcam system on Perserverance’s predecessor, the Curiosity rover, which landed inside Mars’ Gale Crater in August 2012 and is still going strong. But Mastcam-Z is more capable. For example, the Curiosity Mastcam cannot zoom, which you might have guessed from the lack of a “Z” in its name.
Related: NASA’s Mars Perseverance mission in pictures
The Perseverance team is just starting to take stock of the landing site. But the first photos of the rover show a landscape that resembles those explored by other NASA rovers on Mars.
“We’re tucked away in a great place, where you can see different features that are similar in many ways to the features that Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity found on their landing sites,” Jim Bell, Principal Investigator of Mastcam-Z, of the Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, said in a statement from NASA.
NASA will be holding a question-and-answer session tomorrow (February 25) at 4 p.m. EST (9 p.m. GMT) to discuss the high-definition panorama in detail. Bell will be attending this event, as will other Mastcam-Z team members Elsa Jensen, from Malin Space Science Systems, and Kjartan Kinch, from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. You can watch the briefing live here on Space.com, courtesy of NASA.
Perseverance is at the heart of NASA’s $ 2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, which will search for signs of ancient life on Mars in Jezero and collect dozens of samples for a future return to Earth. The rover also performs several technology demonstrations, including a helicopter named Ingenuity that will attempt to become the first rotorcraft to fly over a world beyond Earth.
After completing Perseverance’s post-landing health checks, the rover team will prepare for the Ingenuity pioneer flights, which will likely take place this spring. Science and sampling work will likely begin in earnest this summer, if all goes according to plan, mission team members said.
Mike Wall is the author of “Over there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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