Skip to main content

Perseverance rover’s zooming cameras can capture 3D images of Mars landscape

We’re heading into the last few months before the launch of NASA’s Perseverance rover on its journey to explore Mars. It has already had the cameras which will image the Martian landscape installed and tested, but it will also have a new function that previous Mars rovers have not: The ability to zoom in on particular parts of the landscape using cameras attached to the rover’s mast, called Mastcam-Z (Z for zoom).

A close-up of the head of Perseverance Rover's remote sensing mast
A close-up of the head of Perseverance Rover’s remote sensing mast. The masthead contains the SuperCam instrument (its lens is in the large circular opening). In the gray boxes beneath masthead are the two Mastcam-Z imagers. On the exterior sides of those imagers are the rover’s two navigation cameras. NASA/JPL-Caltech

The Mastcam-Z is an upgrade on previous rover Curiosity’s Mastcam, which was launched in 2011. Curiosity’s cameras have captured some impressive images, but they are not able to zoom as the engineers couldn’t find a way to shrink the zoom technology small enough to make it fit on the Mastcam.

Recommended Videos

“The original plan was for Curiosity to have a zoom camera that could go out to an extreme wide angle like a spaghetti western view,” Jim Bell of Arizona State University, principal investigator for Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z and deputy principal investigator for Curiosity’s Mastcam, said in a statement. “It would have been an amazing panoramic perspective but proved really hard to build at the time.”

Please enable Javascript to view this content

In the end, Curiosity was armed with one telephoto lens and one wide-angle lens, and was able to capture 3D-type stereo images using a combination of the two cameras. But this process is something of a hassle, as nine telescopic images are required to match up to one wide-angle shot.

To achieve the same stereo function on Perseverance in a simpler way, both cameras can zoom independently. So each camera can be adjusted until it matches the required zoom, and the results can easily be combined into a stereo image.

As well as being used for 3D imaging of the landscape to assist the drivers of the rover in their route planning, the cameras will also be used to capture images and mosaics of the views to be shared with the public. This includes a website where amateur enthusiasts can share images created from their own data analyses. “It’s important that the public have a sense of ownership,” Bell said. “The Mastcam-Z images belong to all of us.”

Georgina Torbet
Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…
NASA has wonderful news for its plucky Mars helicopter
NASA's Ingenuity helicopter.

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter made history in April 2021 when it became the first aircraft to achieve powered, controlled flight on another planet.

With Mars’ atmosphere much thinner than Earth’s, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) weren’t certain if they could build a machine capable of obtaining lift on the red planet, let alone creating one able to fly reliably. But with its long, fast-spinning blades, Ingenuity has exceeded expectations, flying over long distances during multiple flights.

Read more
Mars rover Perseverance is heading for the Jezero delta
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its Left Navigation Camera (Navcam) to acquire an image on Feb 24, 2022 (sol 361) of target Sid, a higher standing boulder seen here just above the rover’s arm. Scientists plan to sample this rock before the rover heads to the delta for the mission’s next science campaign.

Having recently passed the one-year mark in exploring Mars's Jezero Crater, the Perseverance rover will soon be packing up and heading off to a new and exciting location: The Jezero delta. As the site of an ancient river delta, this area is one of the most promising locations to search for evidence of ancient life, as it was once an area of warm, shallow water that would be the ideal conditions for the emergence of life.

Until now, the Perseverance rover has been exploring the floor of the Jezero crater and collecting rock samples which will be brought back to Earth for analysis by future missions. Now, the rover will perform a week of analysis before grabbing a sample of a type of rock called Ch’ał which hasn't been sampled so far. With that sample collected, Perseverance will then be heading to the delta to learn more about the history of water in the region.

Read more
All the things the Perseverance rover has achieved in its first year on Mars
Perseverance snapped this view of a hill called “Santa Cruz” on April 29, 2021. About 20 inches (50 centimeters) across on average, the boulders in the foreground are among the type of rocks the rover team has named “Ch’ał” (the Navajo term for “frog” and pronounced “chesh”). Perseverance will return to the area next week or so.

It's been one year since NASA's Perseverance rover made its remarkable landing on Mars. Twelve months on, NASA has shared a roundup of all the achievements the rover has made in its quest to understand the Jezero crater, where it landed, and in its quest to search for evidence of ancient life.

One of the rover's major achievements was collecting samples of Mars rock, which proved tricky at first due to the rock being more crumbly than expected. However, despite the challenges the rover has managed to collect six samples so far which are sealed up in tubes and will be left on the planet's surface for a future mission to collect and eventually bring back to Earth for study.

Read more