NASA released the “largest and highest-resolution” panorama picture of Mars ever taken last Wednesday, March 4.
The 1.8-billion-pixel photo was captured by the Curiosity rover, the space agency said in an official statement on the same day. The photo shows the “Glen Torridon” region on the side of Mount Sharp on the planet.
The image is composed of more than 1,000 images taken from Nov. 24 to Dec. 1, and was stitched together in the following months. The rover’s camera used a telephoto lens to produce the panorama.
Completing the photo entailed more than six hours over the span of four days. The shots were taken between noon and 2 p.m. local Mars time each day to make sure the lighting of the photos were similar.
Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also pointed out more of the photo’s details in a video uploaded to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s YouTube page.
He noted that zooming into the image will let one see the rim of the crater that the rover is inside of, Slangpos crater and the edge of the Greenheugh pediment. Vasavada also explained that the picture’s 360-degree perspective warps the image, which gives it a fisheye-lens appearance.
“This is the first time during the mission we’ve dedicated our operations to a stereo 360-degree panorama,” he added.
After spending seven years on the red planet, Vasavada says that the rover is still “not done making tracks yet.” JB
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