
The agency will put a rover on the Red Planet in 2020 that will produce some spectacular images and mind-blowing 3D visuals.
NASA’s next Mars rover will have a total of 23 eyes to study the landscape of the Red Planet, the agency says. The Mars Curiosity rover has already done some incredible work in the years since it landed on the Martian surface, but NASA wants to go even bigger with its successor, which is set to launch in 2020.
The new rover is being developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, and it will deliver some incredible photographs unlike anything that has ever been seen before. It will have cameras covering its body, including the Mastcam-Z that will be able to visualize the Red Planet in 3D.
The Curiosity rover takes pictures that are one megapixel in size, and are in black and white. The new rover will be able to shoot in full color and the images will be 20 megapixels, so the imagery it will produce will be way better than we are seeing from Mars today. You might say it will have “2020” vision.
“Camera technology keeps improving,” said Justin Maki of JPL, Mars 2020’s imaging scientist and deputy principal investigator of the Mastcam-Z instrument. “Each successive mission is able to utilize these improvements, with better performance and lower cost.”
Leave a Reply