Mega Photo Mosaic Curiosity On Mount Sharp [Video]

2024 Author: | . Last modified: 2024-01-10 03:12

The team's recent Howsedon Hill imaging campaign, planned for a two-month period at the Mary Anning rig, broke the record for the largest photo mosaic so far obtained with the ChemCam Remote Micro-Imaging Device (RMI).

RMI was originally designed to document tiny areas analyzed by ChemCam's laser spectroscopy (LIBS) method on rocks just a few meters from the rover. During Curiosity's first year on Mars, it was recognized that, thanks to its powerful optics, RMI could also transform from a microscope to a telescope and play an important role as a long-range exploration tool. This gives the typical round spyglass for creating black and white images of a small region. So RMI complements other cameras well due to its very long focal length.

From July to October 2020, Curiosity remained at the same location to conduct various analyzes of rock samples. This rare opportunity to stay in the same location for a long time was used by the team to target very distant areas, creating an ever-growing RMI mosaic from September 9 to October 23 (Sol 2878 to Sol 2921) that eventually consisted of 216 overlapping pictures. When stitched into a 46947x7260 pixel panorama, it covers over 50 degrees of azimuth along the horizon, from the bottom Mount Sharp layers on the right to the Vera Rubin Ridge edge on the left. The insets show how the high resolution achieved with RMI reveals various geologic landforms, such as the ripple field near the Vera Rubin Ridge, and an impressive variety of layered structures. All of these features highlight the complex geological history of Gale Crater.

By increasing the contrast of the image in the middle of the panorama above the foreground, it is even possible to recognize details corresponding to the block rocks that partially rolled down from the Gale Crater wall in the distance. When measured using images captured by the orbiter's camera, we clarified that these blocks are 59 kilometers from the rover - a record distance for ChemCam / RMI observations. This is tantamount to seeing buildings in the center of Solnechnogorsk (noginsk or Kubinka) from the center of Moscow. This indicates that, despite the dust in the atmosphere, which varies considerably with the seasons, the sky was clear enough at this time to capture such distant images.