Because Mars.

Rosemary

Yep.  They can do this now.  A panning 360-degree panorama.  Of Mars.

Go full screen, and use your mouse to look around.  And if your mouse has a wheel, you can also zoom in and out!

 


Mars Panorama – Curiosity rover: Martian solar day 1451

 

Oh, look, here’s another!


Mars Panorama – Curiosity rover

They actually have a whole bunch of these over at 360pano.eu.  (They allow you to post them for non-commercial purposes.)

I love seeing Mars as an actual place, and the pannable panoramas do give you that sense of being there.

But, want to see my favorite section the panorama?   It’s this:

Selfie!

Selfie!

Here we’re looking down at the ground, and you can see parts of the rover, and its shadow on the Martian sand.  And its very own name-tag.   On Mars.

That’s a thing that human beings made, that is now sitting right there on a planet that is not Earth.

We made it, we sent it there, it got there, it’s doing its job.    So lovely.

More later — I’ve got ton’s o’ chores to do in the next two days.   Still catching up from fighting-snakes mode.

 

 

 

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 23rd, 2016 at 11:37 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “Because Mars.”

  • Charlie Russel Says:
    September 24th, 2016 at 2:07 pm

    Oh, wow. Thanks so much for posting these. Or maybe I should not thank you — I can see I’m going to be in work avoidance mode this afternoon, looking at all of these and more.

  • Eleanor Sommer Says:
    September 24th, 2016 at 4:04 pm

    Exhilarating! I wish I could be there. For real. And this is not “artist’s” rendering–but actual on-the-ground photos? I am so excited.

    • Ben Says:
      September 24th, 2016 at 4:30 pm

      The colors are adjusted to be similar to how it’d look on Earth, but otherwise they’re ‘real’ photos.

      Probably why they remind me so much of Arizona …