Curiosity’s “Spyglass” Megamosaic from Mount Sharp – NASA’s Mars Exploration Program

A brief introduction, since I am not a regular author of Curiosity’s blog: since the rover landed, I have been involved in the processing of ChemCam’s images at the French University of Nantes. I’m always eager for new data to come in, and the images we’ve collected here as a video are a real treat.

The recent “Housedon Hill” imaging campaign planned by the team over a period of two months while staying at the “Mary Anning” drilling site broke a record and was the largest mosaic so far obtained with ChemCam’s Remote Micro-Imager (RMI ). RMI was originally designed to document the small areas analyzed by ChemCam’s laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) technique on rocks just a few meters from the rover. During the first year of Curiosity on Mars, it was recognized that, thanks to its powerful optics, RMI could also move from a microscope to a telescope and play an important role as a long-range exploration tool. It gives a typical circular “viewer” black and white image of a small region. So RMI complements other cameras nicely, thanks to its very long focal length. When stitched together, RMI mosaics reveal details of the landscape several miles from the rover, yielding images that are highly complementary to orbital observations, creating a more human-like ground-based perspective.

From July to October 2020, Curiosity remained parked in the same place to perform various rock sampling analysis. This rare opportunity to stay in the same location for a long time was used by the team to target very distant areas of interest, building an ever-expanding RMI mosaic between September 9 and October 23 (sols 2878 and 2921) that eventually 216 became overlapping. Pictures. Stitched into a 46947×7260 pixel panorama, it spans more than 50 degrees of azimuth along the horizon, from the lower layers of “Mount Sharp” on the right to the edge of “Vera Rubin Ridge” on the left. The inserts show how the high resolution achieved by the RMI reveals various geological landforms, such as a sand ripple field at Vera Rubin Ridge and an impressive variety of layered units. These features all highlight the complex geological history of Gale Crater. Mount Sharp has a striking ‘marker bed’, a distinct single layer that can be traced almost all over the base and stretches for tens of miles. It appears in this mosaic as a dark layer that is a significant change in the formation of the mountain slopes.

By stretching the contrast of the image in the center of the panorama above the foreground, one can even recognize features that correspond to block-shaped rocks rolling down mid-distance from Gale’s crater wall. When measured using images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Context Camera (CTX), these blocks are 37 miles from the rover – a record-breaking distance for a ChemCam / RMI sighting. This is the equivalent of seeing the downtown Baltimore buildings from Washington DC city center. This indicates that despite the dust in the atmosphere, which varies significantly between seasons, the sky at the time was bright enough to take such distant images.