Billion-Pixel View of Mars Comes From Curiosity Rover

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Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov

Image Advisory: 2013-205 June 19, 2013

Billion-Pixel View of Mars Comes From Curiosity Rover

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-205&cid=release_2013-205

PASADENA, Calif. -- A billion-pixel view from the surface of Mars, from NASA's Mars
rover Curiosity, offers armchair explorers a way to examine one part of the Red Planet in
great detail.

The first NASA-produced view from the surface of Mars larger than one billion pixels
stitches together nearly 900 exposures taken by cameras onboard Curiosity and shows details
of the landscape along the rover's route.

The 1.3-billion-pixel image is available for perusal with pan and zoom tools at:
http://mars.nasa.gov/bp1/ .

The full-circle scene surrounds the site where Curiosity collected its first scoops of dusty sand at
a windblown patch called "Rocknest," and extends to Mount Sharp on the horizon.

"It gives a sense of place and really shows off the cameras' capabilities," said Bob Deen of the
Multi-Mission Image Processing Laboratory at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,
Calif. "You can see the context and also zoom in to see very fine details."

Deen assembled the product using 850 frames from the telephoto camera of Curiosity's Mast
Camera instrument, supplemented with 21 frames from the Mastcam's wider-angle camera and
25 black-and-white frames -- mostly of the rover itself -- from the Navigation Camera. The
images were taken on several different Mars days between Oct. 5 and Nov. 16, 2012. Raw
single-frame images received from Curiosity are promptly posted on a public website at:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/ . Mars fans worldwide have used those images
to assemble mosaic views, including at least one gigapixel scene.

The new mosaic from NASA shows illumination effects from variations in the time of day for
pieces of the mosaic. It also shows variations in the clarity of the atmosphere due to variable
dustiness during the month while the images were acquired.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory project is using Curiosity and the rover's 10 science
instruments to investigate the environmental history within Gale Crater, a location where the
project has found that conditions were long ago favorable for microbial life.

Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, built and operates Curiosity's Mastcam. JPL, a
division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the project for NASA's
Science Mission Directorate in Washington and built the Navigation Camera and the rover.

More information about the mission is online at: http://www.nasa.gov/msl and
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ .

You can follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at:
http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .

For more information about the Multi-Mission Image Processing Laboratory, see:
http://www-mipl.jpl.nasa.gov/mipex.html .

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