One day, many curious representatives of humanity would like to personally visit Mars – the fourth planet that is away from the sun. Despite the lethal radiation, the almost complete absence of oxygen and the extremely low temperatures, Mars has been and remains one of the main candidates for the title of the most studied human object in the solar system. While earthly minds are trying to find the most efficient and cheapest way to get to this albeit harsh but extremely interesting world, the Curiosity Rover that started its work in 2012 decided to add some oil to the fire of human curiosity and us to give new panoramas of the Martian landscape.
View of the surface of Mars, which was scorched by the radiation from the Mars rover "Curiosity"
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The small world of Mars, completely covered with rust, is in fact the only full planet in the solar system, the surface of which is constantly plowed by earthly robots. Despite all our success in creating automated stations that can be operated without human intervention, we are still powerless against today's weather conditions on Mars. It is their impact that determines the presence of those landscape details on the Red Planet whose observation was the primary goal of the NASA-designed Curiosity Rover.
In order to capture the most detailed images of the surface of the fourth planet in the history of astronomy, the rover needed powerful on-board cameras that successfully fulfilled every astrophotographer's dream and showed the Martian landscape with a resolution of 1.8 billion pixels. According to newatlas.com, one of the photos posted by the rover shows the Glen Torridon area on Mount Sharp and the central part of the Gale Crater, where Curiosity landed in August 2012. During operation, the rover traveled 19 kilometers, explored the area and took many photos, including 360-degree panoramas and a series of selfies.
The 1.8 billion pixel panorama of Mars, the most detailed NASA panorama ever created by Curiosity's Mars Rover, shows the closest area
Landing of the rover
The original photo weighs 2.4 GB and can be seen on NASA's official website.
Because of the relatively large distance between the terrestrial observer and Mars, the image data can reach us at a much slower speed than we would like. In order to obtain a high-quality panorama of the planet, the scientists had to combine more than 1,000 images that the rover had taken for four days from noon to two in the afternoon at Martian time. Such a stringent condition was met to ensure that the lighting of all of the images was the same for the convenience of another installation before sending to Earth. It is known that all photos were taken with a special telephoto lens built into the rover, while the device's additional lens created a panorama with a lower resolution of almost 650 million pixels that captures the rover's deck and the robot arm visible underneath.
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The series of panoramas that Curiosity has received is probably not the last, although NASA plans to send a new-generation rover to the Red Planet, Mars 2020, in summer 2020. Six months after starting space travel, the Planet Rover must land on Mars and perform astrobiological studies, examine local geological processes, and evaluate the chances of finding bacterial life in the distant past of the most mysterious planet in the solar system.