Curiosity Mars Rover Sends Back First 360-degree Color Panorama of Gale Crater

Since its historic and flawless landing on the surface of Mars on Monday morning, Eastern Time, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has been beaming back a variety of exciting images and video from the red planet. Yesterday, the Curiosity rover sent back the first 360-degree panorama picture in color of the Gale Crater landing site.

The panoramic image of Mars is a compilation of 130 low-resolution thumbnail images stitched together. The images were received early Thursday morning and are providing scientists and engineers their first color, horizon-to-horizon glimpse of Gale Crater.

“After a year in cold storage, where it endured the rigors of launch, the deep space cruise to Mars and everything that went on during landing, it is great to see our camera is working as planned,” said Mike Malin, principal investigator of the Mastcam instrument from Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego. “As engaging as this color panorama is, it is important to note this is only one-eighth the potential resolution of images from this camera.”

According to NASA the Curiosity team continues to receive high-resolution black-and-white images from its Navigation Camera, or Navcam. Using these individual images, the team has stitched together a high-resolution Navcam panorama, including a glimpse of the rover’s deck. Evident on some portions of the deck are some small Martian pebbles.

“The latest Navcam images show us that the rocket engines on our descent stage kicked up some material from the surface of Mars, several pieces which ended up on our rover’s deck,” said Mike Watkins, mission manager for Curiosity from JPL. “These small pebbles we currently see are up to about 1 centimeter [0.4 inch] in size and should pose no problems for mission operations. It will be interesting to see how long our hitchhikers stick around.”