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.
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."
FULL STORY: JPL releases billion pixel-panorama of Mars: Take a tour
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UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies
Mpact (formerly Rail~Volution)
Chaddick Institute at DePaul University
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Great Falls Development Authority, Inc.
HUDs Office of Policy Development and Research