Rover Sends Back An Incredible Photo From The Surface Of Mars
For quite some time, the photos NASA sent back from Mars were vague snapshots of dust or closeups of bland pebbles. After all, getting to the future can be a slow grind, with incremental steps along the way.
But that changed when NASA’s Mars Rover Opportunity captured the following photo. And at the time, it just may have been the most beautiful image yet captured on our nearest neighbor’s planetary surface.
Check out what the rover sent back, and just picture yourself standing on the Mars surface one day (maybe sooner than later).
The photo was taken using a panoramic camera in the late Mars afternoon (around 4:30 to 5:00 pm Mars time). This was originally published and presented to the public in May 2012. Then a few months later in July 2012, another photo was shared.
But there’s an important catch with these Mars photos. That’s not how it would actually look to the human eye. The image was captured using different filters which were combined to make this mosaic view.
And these colors weren’t exactly 100% accurate at the time either. These were the combination of more than 800 individual photos taken and then enhanced with filters to give a better sense of the landscape scheme.
At the time, Jim Bell of Arizona State University a lead scientist and NASA representative had this to say about the pictures: “The view provides rich geologic context for the detailed chemical and mineral work that the team did at Greeley Haven over the rover’s fifth Martian winter, as well as a spectacularly detailed view of the largest impact crater that we’ve driven to yet with either rover over the course of the mission.”
With each passing year, we are given more and more detailed (and stunning) photos of Mars, giving a much better sense of what is happening on the Red Planet. Mapping the surface, understanding the conditions, and tracking the patterns will be crucial in unraveling what’s long been a mystery in our solar system.
While humans haven’t ventured there yet, as more information is gathered, it is becoming increasingly likely it will happen eventually. And when we do get there, Mars is unlikely to be a total mystery. As the information gathering only ramps up over the years, there’s a good chance the planet will be a “known” entity (so to speak) when it does happen.
