These 3D images will help them decide where to drive by helping to identify obstacles and slopes and trenches and rocks and stuff like that, allowing them to drive the rover much deeper into places than they would have been able to otherwise.Īnd finally, we’re going to make really cool 3D views of our landing site to share with the public, including movies and flyovers. Our engineering and driving colleagues really need that information too. And we want to make 3D maps of the landing site. We want to put the pieces of the delta geology story together not just with two-dimensional, spatial information, but with height as well as texture. We want to understand the topography of Mars in much more detail than we’ve been able to in the past. With this, we can build a three-dimensional image back on Earth when we get those images.ģD images allow us to do a whole range of things scientifically. Just like our left eye and our right eye build a three-dimensional image in our brain, the zoom cameras on Perserverance are a left eye and a right eye. This allows us to get great stereo images. In Perseverance, we’re sending similar cameras, but with zoom technology so we can zoom from wide angle to telephoto with both cameras – the “Z” in Mastcam-Z stands for zoom. The Mastcam-Z includes two cameras with zoom lenses allowing researchers to create three-dimensional images of the Martian landscape. Unless something actually gets up and walks in front of the cameras, we’re really not going to find that. The environment of Mars is extremely harsh compared to the Earth, so we’re not really looking for evidence of current life.
What we’re looking for is evidence of past life, either direct chemical or organic signs in the composition and the chemistry of rocks, or textural evidence in the rock record. We spoke with him in late January for The Conversation’s new podcast, The Conversation Weekly.īelow are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. He is the primary investigator leading a team in charge of one of the camera systems on Perseverance. Jim Bell is a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University and has worked on a number of Mars missions. 18, NASA’s Mars 2020 mission arrived at the red planet and successfully landed the Perseverance Rover on the surface.
0 kommentar(er)
