NASA’s Curiosity rover has captured the highest-resolution panorama yet of the Martian surface and it consists of 1,000 images snapped during the 2019 Thanksgiving holiday. The resulting composite contains 1.8 billion pixels of the Martian landscape, thanks to the rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, which used its telephoto lens to produce the panorama. Its medium-angle lens was used to capture a lower-resolution, nearly 650-million-pixel panorama, that includes the rover’s deck and robotic arm.
The panorama showcase the “Glen Torridon” region on the side of Mount Sharp that Curiosity is exploring. It required over 6.5 hours over the span of four days for Curiosity to capture the individual shots. Mastcam operators pointed the rover’s mast and made sure the images were in focus. To keep lighting consistent, the team confined imaging to between noon and 2 p.m. local Mars time each day.
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While many on our team were at home enjoying turkey, Curiosity produced this feast for the eyes. This is the first time during the mission we’ve dedicated our operations to a stereo 360-degree panorama,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which leads the Curiosity rover mission.
