Thursday, June 27, 2013

Mars rover Curiosity captures 1.3-gigapixel panorama of the Red Planet


"The image, titled Billion-Pixel View from Curiosity at Rocknest, was assembled from almost 900 photos captured by Curiosity between October 5 and November 16 last year. 850 photos came from Mastcam 100, the 100mm (telescopic) camera atop Curiosity’s mast, with 21 supplementary images provided by Mastcam 34 (the wide-angle camera that sits next to Mastcam 100) and 25 black-and-white frames from Curiosity’s Navigation Camera. Because the photos were captured over a number of days, you can see quite a few variations caused by the angle of the Sun and the dusty atmosphere. As an interesting aside, it’s fun to note that each Mastcam is only equipped with a 2-megapixel sensor — proof that the megapixel myth is indeed a myth. 1.3 billion pixels, in case you were wondering, is 1.3 gigapixels — or 1,300 megapixels."


You can spin and zoom in on a 360-degree panorama of the Curiosity rover's surroundings at Rocknest on Mars, thanks to an interactive Photosynth viewer. A guided tour points you to some of the hot spots. Click on the image to go to the viewer, or try out the embedded version at Extreme Tech which goes into auto mode and flies across the middle photo panel, zooming in on the highlighted features displayed in the side panel captions:  http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/159902-curiosity-captures-1-3-gigapixel-panorama-of-mars

PASADENA, Calif. -- A billion-pixel view from the surface of Mars, from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, offers armchair explorers a way to examine one part of the Red Planet in great detail.

The first NASA-produced view from the surface of Mars larger than one billion pixels stitches together nearly 900 exposures taken by cameras onboard Curiosity and shows details of the landscape along the rover's route.
The 1.3-billion-pixel image is available for perusal with pan and zoom tools at: http://mars.nasa.gov/bp1/ and a scaled down version (~159MB) is available for direct download here: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA16919 .


The full-circle scene surrounds the site where Curiosity collected its first scoops of dusty sand at a windblown patch called "Rocknest," and extends to Mount Sharp on the horizon.

"It gives a sense of place and really shows off the cameras' capabilities," said Bob Deen of the Multi-Mission Image Processing Laboratory at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "You can see the context and also zoom in to see very fine details."


Deen assembled the product using 850 frames from the telephoto camera of Curiosity's Mast Camera instrument, supplemented with 21 frames from the Mastcam's wider-angle camera and 25 black-and-white frames -- mostly of the rover itself -- from the Navigation Camera. The images were taken on several different Mars days between Oct. 5 and Nov. 16, 2012. Raw single-frame images received from Curiosity are promptly posted on a public website at: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/ . Mars fans worldwide have used those images to assemble mosaic views, including at least one gigapixel scene.

The new mosaic from NASA shows illumination effects from variations in the time of day for pieces of the mosaic. It also shows variations in the clarity of the atmosphere due to variable dustiness during the month while the images were acquired.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory project is using Curiosity and the rover's 10 science instruments to investigate the environmental history within Gale Crater, a location where the project has found that conditions were long ago favorable for microbial life.
Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, built and operates Curiosity's Mastcam. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington and built the Navigation Camera and the rover.

More information about the mission is online at: http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ .

You can follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at: http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .

For more information about the Multi-Mission Image Processing Laboratory, see: http://www-mipl.jpl.nasa.gov/mipex.html .




1 comment:

  1. Phobos • 7 hours ago −
    It looks like the Arizona desert minus the vegetation. It would be cool if they could send a flying drone to cover more terrain and use the curiosity as the launching device and at the same time functioning as a charger of batteries for the flying drone.

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