NASA released a stunningly detailed panorama of Mars this week.
The space agency’s Curiosity rover captured this highest-resolution ever image of the Martian surface during the 2019 Thanksgiving holiday and it was published on Thursday.
It’s composed of more than 1,000 images and was meticulously assembled over the course of months — resulting in a composite that contains 1.8 billion pixels of the Red Planet’s landscape.
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NASA’s Curiosity rover captured its highest-resolution panorama of the Martian surface between Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 2019. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
(NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
“While many on our team were at home enjoying turkey, Curiosity produced this feast for the eyes,” Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which leads the Curiosity rover mission, said in a statement. “This is the first time during the mission we’ve dedicated our operations to a stereo 360-degree panorama.”
The rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, used its telephoto lens to produce the panorama and the process took six and a half hours over the course of four days to capture the images.
In order to ensure consistent lighting, Mastcam operators confined their work to between noon and 2 p.m. local Mars time each day.
