In a PetaPixel exclusive, find out how NASAJPL created this gorgeous time-blended panorama of Mars.
in southern California, the man who planned, captured, and processed the photos to make the “postcard.”or NASA’s other Mars missions. They are a striking way to show the beauty of Mars and engage the public in ways that highly technical scientific images can struggle to achieve.
“NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover used its black-and-white navigation cameras to capture panoramas of this scene at two times of day. This was the view at 4:10 p.m. local Mars time.” | Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech “We’re usually very constrained — either time-constrained or power-constrained — packing things into any given days’ worth of activities. We just had this unique opportunity. We had just upgraded the rover’s flight software, which isn’t something we often do. The last one was many years ago, and it was a major effort over many years,” Ellison explains.
“We typically use the navigation camera to get the lay of the land. Whenever we drive the rover, we pull up and take a complete 360-degree image of the landscape once we stop,” Ellison explains. “We also use them for things like dust devil movies, cloud movies, looking for weather phenomena, because they have that nice wide field of view for looking those potential features you might see in the sky. They’re primarily there for engineering, but we do a bit of science with them.
After this channel mixing, there is a bit of tweaking to ensure each image is lined up, and Ellison performed a bit of additional adjustment, such as curves and levels. He also extended the gradient in the sky to ensure the postcard fit a typical desktop monitor. “That’s what we were going for,” Ellison exclaims. “When we did it two years ago, I hoped it would look like this if we took two images at different times of the day. I had an idea it’d look like this. I liked the result then, so with some confidence, I proposed the idea again this time.”
“Apart from the fact it has no atmosphere, so you’d immediately asphyxiate, in terms of temperature, the ground temperature would be room temperature, but the atmosphere is so thin that you could walk around in sandals and a parka. Your head would be so cold. It’s bizarre,” adds Ellison. A day in the life of Curiosity comprises waking up and receiving instructions, which it then carries out until the next communications pass with one of NASA’s Mars orbiters. Curiosity will send its data then and receive new instructions, often for scientific imaging and perhaps a bit of moving. The rover moves 10 or 20 meters in a day, or up to 40 meters on a good day. By this point, it is around noon on Mars, and the process starts over again.
There are many incredible and diverse landscapes within six hours of JPL, Trona Pinnacles, the Mojave, Death Valley, Yosemite, and much more. “We are just spoiled rotten with places to go to scratch a landscape photography itch over here,” Ellison says. “I’ve spent many an hour doing landscape photography in the Mojave.”
Alongside the release of the colorful new postcard, Ellison also wanted the team to include the original black and white shots he captured. That wasn’t by accident.
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