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Mastcam-Zs First 360-Degree Panorama
This is the first 360-degree panorama taken by Mastcam-Z, a zoomable pair of cameras aboard NASAs Perseverance Mars rover. The panorama was stitched together on Earth from 142 individual images taken on Sol 3, the third Martian day of the mission (Feb. 21, 2021).
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/ASU
NASAs Mars 2020 Perseverance rover got its first high-definition look around its new home in Jezero Crater on Feb. 21, after rotating its mast, or head, 360 degrees, allowing the rovers Mastcam-Z instrument to capture its first panorama after touching down on the Red Planet on Feb 18. It was the rovers second panorama ever, as the rovers Navigation Cameras, or Navcams, also located on the mast, captured a 360-degree view on Feb. 20.
Mars has fascinated us for millennia. Almost from the time astronomers first turned their telescopes on the planet shining in the night sky, we ve imagined life there. Unlike our other planetary neighbor, Venus, which remains shrouded in cloudy mystery, the red planet has invited speculation and exploration. Since the 1960s, the U.S. and the Soviet Union and, later, Russia and Japan, have launched spacecraft destined to land on or orbit Mars.
The successful missions, like the very first Mars flyby in 1964 by the U.S. Mariner 4, have provided a treasure trove of data and, of course, introduced many new questions. Recently, those data, provided compliments of spacecraft such as the Phoenix Mars Lander, the Curiosity rover, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, have been arriving at Earth at a dizzying rate. It seems like a golden age for Mars exploration has arrived.
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Carrying five cameras from San Diego, NASA’s Perseverance rover on Thursday survived a wild descent through Mars’ atmosphere and safely landed in a wide crater to begin its search for ancient signs of life.
The spacecraft used the friction of the atmosphere, retrorockets and a parachute to slow down, and was guided into Jezero Crater by a suite of navigational instruments, including a camera built by Malin Space Science Systems of Sorrento Valley.
The $2.4 billion Perseverance landed on Mars at 12:55 p.m. Pacific time, and began transmitting landing photos to Earth less than 15 minutes later.
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Malin also provided four other cameras that will help the rover to slowly roll across an ancient lake bed and carry out a robust science mission that includes drilling into the surface of Mars. The crater covers roughly the same distance between San Diego and Alpine, and it has a hostile environment. At times, the temperature drops to minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit.