That feature means that even Perseverance’s hazard cameras-which serve a similar purpose to the back-up camera on a car-produce gorgeous, high-resolution images. So while some of Curiosity’s cameras photograph in black-and-white, the same set on Perseverance shoots in color, which helps scientists back home guide the newer rover toward scientifically interesting targets. Perseverance was designed to explore Mars more autonomously than earlier rovers, which meant developing cameras good enough to support that capability, according to Katie Stack Morgan, the deputy project scientist for the mission at NASA. But Perseverance has 23 cameras, six more than Curiosity, and they’re more advanced than the ones used for previous missions. There’s no high-speed internet between Earth and Mars, so there are limits on the data that a rover can transmit home. “By today’s consumer-electronics standards, these cameras that are up on Mars-and elsewhere in the solar system-are nowhere near as high-resolution,” Bell said. The Perseverance rover, meanwhile, has the best set of robotic eyes on Mars yet-though they’re not as sophisticated as you might think. The Curiosity rover, which arrived in 2012, is still going strong and filling up its camera roll on the side of a mountain, about 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) away from Perseverance’s turf. In the late 1990s, NASA began sending a steady stream of robots that, unlike landers, could move around and capture the Martian environment from different angles. The Viking 1 lander, which stayed put on the Martian soil, revealed a reddish field of boulders stretching all the way to the horizon. The first pictures taken on the Martian surface were captured by another NASA mission in 1976. NASA’s hand-painted view of the surface of Mars from 1965 (NASA /JPL-Caltech / Dan Goods) When the real deal finally came in, it marked the first time humankind had gotten a close-up of the surface of another planet. Back on Earth, converting the data into real images was a slow process-so slow that the staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, excited and impatient, pulled numbers from Mariner’s data that corresponded with color, printed the numerals on paper, and then painted the makeshift canvas with pastels that one of them had bought at a local art store. In 1965, a NASA probe called Mariner 4 made the first flyby and beamed home its observations. Scientists and engineers have come a long way from the earliest attempts to capture close-up views of Mars. Read: Mars’s soundscape is strangely beautiful “In reality, the place would be trying to kill us in so many ways,” Bell told me. “Bring some water bring some oxygen.” Mars would actually be a terrible place to hike, let alone live. “You just want to go hiking in that environment,” says Jim Bell, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University who leads the camera team Rojas works on. Right: boulders in a silky, sandy landscape. Left: an imprint left behind by the Perseverance rover's instruments. It’s quite another to gaze upon something you could easily imagine finding on a Tripadvisor page about the best state parks in Arizona. It’s one thing to look at a zoomed-out shot of Mars as a perfect sphere against the darkness of space. In Perseverance’s pictures, it looks like not only a real planet but also a real place. In our night sky, Mars is nothing more than a gleaming tangerine speck. The soft, muted browns and oranges of the terrain look remarkably vivid. In more detail than ever before, we can see that the red planet’s rocky outcroppings are bursting with texture, layer after layer. The rover’s job is to search for potential signs of fossilized life in the rock, but since it arrived last February, it has become quite the landscape photographer. The difference is us, and particularly the Perseverance mission, which has captured some of the sharpest views of the Martian surface to date. That’s not to say that the planet has been working on its appearance aside from the winds blowing around some dust, it has remained mostly unchanged for a few billion years. “I am often the first person to lay eyes on photos from Mars taken by the rover,” Rojas told me.Īnd Mars has been looking particularly good lately. Then, she basks in the wondrous sights of our celestial neighbor.

Rojas, an operations engineer at Arizona State University, checks that the rover’s main cameras are working well, and that they took the shots scientists back home had asked for. She drives to the office, grabs a cup of coffee, and then pulls up the latest dispatches from Perseverance, a car-size NASA rover situated inside a crater in Mars’s northern hemisphere. When Corrine Rojas comes into work, Mars is waiting for her.

Mars images