NASA's Mars Perseverance Rover has launched successfully, and it's carrying a record number of cameras to help it search for signs of life on the Red Planet. The six-wheeled robot, which is the successor to the Mars Curiosity Rover, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida and is expected to land on the surface of Mars on February 18, 2021. Its younger brother landed on Mars in August 2012 and remains there, doing research to this day, living off its radioactive isotopic energy source. So why did NASA launch another rover to Mars, and what's so special about the many cameras needed for the journey? We've taken a closer look at their imaging technology, and some of them have a surprising amount in common with the terrestrial camera in your pocket...
Perseverance vs curiosity: camera improvements
The Mars Perseverance Rover has the same Wall-E charm as Curiosity, but the technology inside is very different. Curiosity has 17 cameras, Perseverance has 23, four of which are used to document the landing process, plus the parachute that will help this remarkable "car" land safely. We'll explore what these 23 cameras do later, but the fundamental technology upgrades deserve attention first.
![Rover de la NASA en Marte]()
(Image credit: NASA) Curiosity uses 1 MP black and white cameras to capture the incredible images that you can see regularly posted on NASA's website. On the other hand, the Perseverance has 20MP color sensors, much closer to the resolution of your phone or camera. This means you can take photos without the multiple exposure stitching method used by Curiosity. Some of its cameras also have wider-angle lenses, allowing you to capture more of the Martian landscape without panning. "Our previous navigation cameras would take multiple photos and stitch them together," says JPL's Colin McKinney, product delivery manager for one of the Perseverance camera families. "With the wider field of view, we get the same perspective in one shot."
Portrait mode on Mars
Why does the old Mars Rover have a low-res footage, looking old-school even for 2012? Curiosity was in development long before launch, obviously, but there was also data performance to consider. You can't just take Bluetooth or AirDrop photos of the surface of Mars in Florida. Even with Bluetooth 5.0. NASA has mitigated this problem by using spacecraft in orbit around Mars as data transmitters. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter MAVEN and the European Space Agency's Trace Gas Orbiter will support the Perseverance Rover in this way for two years, which is the initial period of its mission.
![NASA Mars Rover]()
(Image credit: NASA) Perseverance cameras also make much more use of stereoscopy. This is where two cameras are placed close to each other, but with enough distance between them to get a slightly different view of a scene. These differences are analyzed to produce a 3D depth map that can distinguish close objects from distant objects and create three-dimensional images. Many smartphones use the same technique for their "Portrait" modes, which blur the background to emulate the effect of a large aperture DSLR-type camera lens. For those of us who would rather read NASA's blog than take selfies, this means we can look forward to incredible high-resolution 'first person' color images of the surface of Mars that we can view through headsets. virtual reality or Google Cardboard. This is not his actual role, of course. The 23 cameras and two microphones are the eyes and ears of Perseverence. "You'll feel the air around you, you'll see and scan the horizon, you'll hear the planet with microphones on the surface for the first time, you'll feel it as you take samples to cache," says Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at The NASA. . These cameras can be divided into a few categories. There are only a few to record the landing process which, if all goes well, we can expect to see on February 18, 2021. Then there are the navigation and hazard detection cameras, as well as their "science cameras." These are the eyes of Perseverance's research tools, like her robotic arm. Let's take a closer look at how some of them work.
The head of the Mars rover
The footage we'll see in Perseverance is likely to come from the rover's equivalent of the ``head'', if it were a Pixar character. Two sets of 20MP navigation cameras can be found on each side of the head on Perseverance's main mast. These will be used by the team's engineers to find safe paths for the Rover, and will have visual acuity to "spot a golf ball at 82 feet," according to NASA. This can be with the help of the Mastcam-Z units that sit right next to these 20MP 'eyeball' cameras.
![NASA Mars Rover]()
(Image credit: NASA) The "Z" part represents zoom. Inside the barrel are two groups of zoom lens elements, offering focal lengths from 28-100mm, comparable to a large DSLR lens. They can focus on objects just two meters away and their pixel pitch of 7.4 microns isn't too far off from that of the Sony Alpha A7S III (8.4 microns). Resolution is much lower, at 2MP (a maximum image size of 1600x1200), but the combination of wide-angle and zoom cameras gives the Perseverance head unit an incredibly versatile view of its Martian environment. See that part about those cameras, which looks a bit like a home theater projector? This is the Perseverance SuperCam. Despite its exciting name, this is not a traditional imaging camera. The SuperCam uses a laser to scan rocks and dirt, focusing on a target smaller than a pencil tip.
![NASA Mars Rover]()
(Image credit: NASA) Perseverance also has two rows of wide-angle hazard cameras that allow engineers to see around the Rover's feet. There are four of these cameras at the front and two at the back. You can think of them a bit like parking sensors on a car. They will see rocks and debris not visible to the cameras on the main mast and can act as a guide pointing where to point the sensors on the robot arm.
Elementary my dear Watson
NASA isn't afraid to indulge in the weird geeky reference. WATSON and SHERLOC are two sets of hardware sensors on the Perseverance robotic arm. SHERLOC is a spectrometer that uses a deep ultraviolet laser to analyze objects on the surface of Mars, aided by the WATSON camera.
![NASA Mars Rover]()
(Image credit: NASA) This provides a broader, more user-friendly view of what the highly focused SHERLOC sensors are looking at. NASA says WATSON is "almost identical" to the MAHLI camera used on the old Curiosity Rover. It is a 1600 x 1200 (2MP) camera with a magnifying field of view, used to look at objects as close as 18,3mm. You can also record 720p video.
What's Next for NASA's Mars Rover?
The Rover Perseverance will land in the Jezero crater on Mars, which has a diameter of 49 km. This location was chosen because it is believed to be the site of what was once a body of water. "The only way it could form geometrically was if it were a lake," NASA planetary scientist Dr. Caleb Fassett told the NY Times. Nighttime temperatures in the crater drop to minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 90 degrees Celsius), so hopefully the aptly named perseverance has taken on a mantle. The rover will spend "at least one year on Mars," which is worth just under two of our Earth years, searching for signs of microbial life and collecting soil and samples. These will be stored in sealed tubes. Another camera is used here as well: the CacheCam looks down the tube as the Martian material is collected, to record the process. One latest exciting technology is that Rover will also carry a helicopter drone, known as Wit. It will be the "first aircraft to attempt a control flight on another planet." And thanks to transmission delays, the limited instructions given by the engineers will have been scheduled long before the flight actually took place. Perseverance is a 1.025 kg, 3 meter long, €2.4 billion space car. Let's hope it makes its way to Mars safely.