Friday Eye Candy: A Billion-Pixel Panorama of Mars

The Mars Curiosity Rover has sent us some pretty cool stuff since landing on the red planet in August of 2012. The latest souvenir of its trip is a billion-pixel panorama of the planet's surface.

June 21, 2013, 2pm PDT | Jonathan Nettler | @nettsj

NASA

Using 900 images stitched together from photographs taken between Oct. 5 and Nov. 16 2012 at Rocknest - "a windblown, rocky area of Mars where Curioisty did its first digging in the sand..." - the billion-pixel panorama released by JPL provides an incredibly detailed image of the planet's surface, reports Deborah Netburn.

The cylindrical viewer offers a neat guided menu of features; a necessity since much of the rocks, and sand, and more rocks, and more sand, look similar to the untrained eye. As Netburn notes: "full screen mode is a must: The clarity of the image is especially dazzling when it is big."

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JPL releases billion pixel-panorama of Mars: Take a tour

Published on Wednesday, June 19, 2013 in Los Angeles Times