For years, Mars has been in the sights of many people (including NASA) as the next place to explore in the Universe. And yet we still know little about the Red Planet.
To feed that hunger for Mars that we have, NASA this week published an image captured by the Curiosity rover of the Martian landscape that is actually a mega-galaxy made up of 216 individual images and that the rover took two months to assemble.
The images were made with the Curiosity rover’s ChemCam RMI camera between September 9 and October 23 of this year, NASA said on its blog. This mosaic is a record for NASA itself, putting together the largest number of individual images to appreciate the arid landscape of the Red Planet.
The RMI camera offers spyglass shaped black and white images, round images, and is designed for extreme close-ups with a very far focal length. Thus, when the images are joined, a landscape is seen miles away from the rover and these images complement the orbital observations, giving NASA a perspective more similar to that of a person standing on the Martian surface.
Curiosity remained stationary at the Mary Anning drill site without moving from July to October this year, conducting various analyzes of rock samples. That opened up the rare opportunity to take a catalog of photos from the same site over an extended period. The result was 216 photographs that, when superimposed, offer us a panorama of 46947 × 7260 pixels that covers a view of 50 degrees azimuth on the horizon of Mars, from the skirts of Aeolis Mons (known as Mount Sharp), on the right side, to the place called the Vera Rubin Ridge, on the far left, all of it, inside Gale crater.
“The squares, thanks to the high resolution achieved by [the camera] RMI, reveal various geological formations, such as a field of sand waves near the Vera Rubin Ridge, and an impressive variety of layers,” he explains in the NASA publication Stéphane Le Mouélic, a remote sensing specialist at the University of Nantes in France, who is collaborating on the Curiosity mission. “All of these features highlight the complex geological history of Gale Crater.”
The panorama is impressive in itself, and more if we imagine it with the red colors that characterize the neighboring planet.