(CNN) – The Perseverance rover has had a chance to settle on Mars since landing last Thursday, so it’s doing what every new resident is doing these days: submitting photos of their new home.
In this case, it’s a constant stream of fantastic images from another planet.
The rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument, a pair of zoom color cameras, sent 142 images of its landing site on February 21. NASA teams have brought them together to create the instrument’s first 360-degree panoramic image.
This is the first high-resolution panoramic image captured by the Perseverance Rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument.
This is the first high-definition look at Jezero Crater, the site of a 3.9 billion-year-old dry lake bed where the rover will look for signs of ancient life over the next two years.
The image shows the crater rim and cliff of an old river delta in the distance. It is no different from the images previously shared by NASA’s Curiosity rover of its reconnaissance site in Gale Crater.
“We are in an ideal location where you can see several features that are in many ways similar to features found by Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity at their landing sites,” Jim Bell, Principal Investigator of the Mastcam-Z instrument on their landing sites, the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University said in a statement.
The rim of the Jezero crater can be seen in the distance.
Perseverance also posted a panoramic picture over the weekend with their Navcams or navigation cameras.
Mastcam-Z is a new persistence feature that builds on the lessons learned from the Mastcam instrument on the Curiosity rover. Curiosity’s Mastcam has two cameras with a fixed focal length, while Mastcam-Z has zoom options.
Like high-definition eyes, these two cameras focus on perseverance as you share your views with a team of scientists and engineers at home.
They sit on the mast of the rover and reach eye level for a person who is just over six feet tall. The cameras are 9 inches apart to allow stereo playback.
The color images produced by Mastcam-Z are very close to the quality expected from a digital HD camera, NASA officials said. These cameras can not only zoom in, but also focus to capture videos, panoramas and 3D images.
This wind-carved rock is featured in the first 360-degree panorama taken by the Mastcam-Z instrument.
This allows scientists on the mission team to investigate objects both near and far from the rover.
These capabilities will aid in overall mission objectives, both in understanding the geological history of the crater and in identifying the types of rocks that the rover’s other instruments should study. Mastcam-Z’s views will also help scientists determine which rocks to collect samples from that will eventually be returned to Earth for future missions.
The team working on the Mastcam-Z instrument will share more details about the panorama on the NASA website and on their social networks on Thursday, February 25 at 4:00 p.m. Miami time.