NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover has come forward effectively, and carries a record number of cameras to look for life symptoms on the red planet.
The six-wheeled robot, which is the successor to the Mars Curiosity Rover, took off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida and is scheduled to land on Mars on February 18, 2021.
His younger brother landed on Mars in August 2012 and remains there, researching to this day, living off his radioactive isotopic energy source.
So why did NASA launch the rover on Mars and what’s so special about the many cameras needed for the trip? We’ve taken a closer look at their image generation, and some of them have an unexpected amount that’s not unusual with the floor camera in your pocket…
The Mars Perseverance Rover has the same Wall-E charm as the Curiosity, but the generation is very different.
Curiosity has 17 cameras, Perseverance has 23, 4 of which are used to document the contact process, plus the parachute that will make this remarkable “car” land safely.
Later, we’ll explore what those 23 cameras are doing, but the fundamental technical updates first deserve some attention.
Curiosity uses 1MP black-and-white cameras to capture amazing photos that you can see posted on NASA’s website. On the other hand, Perseverance has 20MP color sensors, much closer to the solution of your phone or camera.
This means you can take pictures with the multiple exposure meeting approach used through Curiosity. Some of its cameras are also supplied with wider angle lenses, allowing you to capture more of the landscape from panoramic views of Mars.
“Our previous Navcams took several photos and assembled them,” says Colin McKinney of JPL, product delivery manager for one of perseverance’s camera families. “With the wider view box, we get the same thing in one shot.”
Why does the old Mars Rover have hardware so low-resolution, which seems obsolete even for 2012?
Curiosity was in progression long before its release, of course, but there was also knowledge to consider. You can’t just take pictures with Bluetooth or AirDrop from the surface of Mars to Florida. Even with Bluetooth 5.0.
NASA has mitigated this challenge by using spacecraft orbiting Mars as a transmitter of knowledge. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter MAVEN and the European Space Agency’s Trace Gas Orbiter will carry the Perseverance Rover this way for two years, the initial era of their mission.
Perseverance cameras also use stereoscopy much more. This is where two cameras are placed near each other, but with enough distance between them to get another view of a scene. These differences are then analyzed to produce a three-dimensional intensity map that can distinguish elements close to remote elements and create three-dimensional images.
Many smartphones use the same strategy for their “Portrait” modes, which blur the background to emulate the effect of a giant aperture DSLR camera lens. For those of us who prefer to read NASA’s blog instead of taking selfies, this means we can expect amazing high-resolution first-person color photographs from the Surface of Mars that we can see through a virtual real viewer or Google Cardboard.
That’s his real role, of course. The 23 cameras and two microphones are Perseverence’s eyes and ears.
”He’ll stumble into the air around him, see and scan the horizon, hear the planet with microphones on the surface for the first time, while sampling to cache ‘,’ says Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Scientific Missions Directorate. Training
These cameras can be divided into some categories. There are only a few to record the contact procedure which, if all goes well, we can expect to see on February 18, 2021.
Then there are the navigation and hazard detection cameras, such as their “scientific cameras”. These are the eyes of Perseverance’s research team as his robotic arm. Let’s take a closer look at how some of them work.
The photographs we see in Perseverance will come from the equivalent of the rover’s “head” if it were a Pixar character.
Two sets of 20MP Navcams are on each side of the head on the main mast of Perseverance. These will be used through team engineers to locate roads for the Rover, and will have visual acuity to “detect an 82-foot golf ball,” according to NASA.
This can be with Mastcam-Z equipment that is located right next to those 20MP “eyeball” cameras.
The “Z” component represents the zoom. Two zoom lens element equipment is located inside the cylinder, providing focal lengths from 28 to 100 mm, comparable to a flexible and suitable DSLR lens.
They can do this in elements just two meters away and their 7.4 micron pixel pitch is not far from that of the Sony Alpha A7S III (8.4 micron).
The solution is much lower, at 2 MP (so a maximum symbol length of 1,600 x 1,200), however, the combination of wide-angle and zoom cameras gives perseverance’s main unit an incredibly flexible view of its Martian environment.
Do you see this component on those cameras, which looks a little like a home theater projector? It’s perseverance’s SuperCam. Despite its interesting name, it is a classic imaging camera. The SuperCam uses a laser to analyze rocks and soil, focusing on a target smaller than the tip of a pencil.
Perseverance also has two rows of wide-angle hazard cameras that allow engineers to see around the Rover’s feet.
There are four of those cameras in the front and two in the back.
You can think of this very similarly to a car’s parking sensors. They will see rocks and visual debris for the cameras on the main mast and can be used as advisors to indicate where to point the sensors at the robot’s arm.
NASA is not afraid to surrender to the geek reference. WATSON and SHERLOC are two groups of hardware sensors in Perseverance’s robotic arm.
SHERLOC is a spectrometer that uses a deep ultraviolet laser to analyze elements on the surface of Mars and is assisted by the WATSON camera.
This provides a wider and easier-to-use view of highly specific SHERLOC sensors.
NASA says WATSON is “almost identical” to the MAHLI camera used in the former Curiosity Rover. It is a 1600 x 1200 (2MP) camera with a magnifying glass view box, which is used to look at objects at a distance of up to 18.3 mm. You can also record 720p videos.
The Rover Perseverance will land at the Jezero crater on Mars, which has a diameter of 49 km. This position was selected because it is intended to be the site of what was once a water frame.
”The only way geometrically shaped is that it’s a lake,’ NASA planetary scientist Caleb Fassett told the NY Times.
Nighttime temperatures in the crater drop to minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit (minus Celsius), so we hope that perseverance, aptly named, has taken a mantle.
The rover will remain “at least a year on Mars,” which is worth just under two of our Earth years, for symptoms of microbial life and sample and soil collection. These will be stored in sealed tubes. Another camera is also used here: the CacheCam looks inside the tube while the Martian curtains are collected, to record the process.
An exciting new generation is that Rover will also bring in an unmanned helicopter, known as Ingenuity. It will be the “first aircraft to attempt a control flight on some other planet.” And thanks to transmission delays, the limited instructions given by engineers will have been scheduled long before the flight takes place.
Perseverance is a 1,025 kg, 3 meters long and $2.4 billion long car. Let’s hope he gets to Mars safely.
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