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NASA's Mars Exploration Program (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Sol 0298: Auld Lang Séítah
The panorama is made up of 99 individual Mastcam-Z images stitched together. The images were taken on Sols 286-312 (Dec. 9, 2021 to Jan. 5, 2022).
While many reflect on the past and bid it farewell, there’s a lot of exciting science to come in the next year. While many were enjoying the days between the Christmas and New Year holidays in the US, at JPL we were working to finish up sampling activities at Issole. We’ll soon bid an Auld Lang Syne to the Séítah region.
As lead Mapping Specialist, I get enjoy looking at the road ahead for the rover. We’ll start be looping back around Séítah east, following our path back towards the Octavia E. Butler Landing site, then curling counter-clockwise to the delta front. In this mission rewind, we get a chance to look at some of the intriguing outcrops we’ve seen before like at Citadelle (where we first grabbed cores 1 & 2, around the sol 180 position on August 21, 2021), perhaps a new look at the unique layering at Mure (sol 168 on August 8, 2021), or even some of the rocks we didn’t get as close to as we wanted, just east of the landing site (sol 73 on May 4th (be with you!), 2021).
Remember to follow along as we explore with our online rover map that we update every time we drive. My New Year’s resolution for the mission is to continue bringing you new maps and help scientists find the best rocks for the rover to explore throughout 2022!
Written by Fred Calef III, Mapping Specialist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust). Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis. The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for the agency by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover. Other panoramas of Mars by Perseverance rover:
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The planet Earth has proven to be too limiting for our awesome community of panorama photographers. We're getting an increasing number of submissions that depict locations either not on Earth (like Mars, the Moon, and Outer Space in general) or do not realistically represent a geographic location on Earth (either because they have too many special effects or are computer generated) and hence don't strictly qualify for our Panoramic World project.But many of these panoramas are extremely beautiful or popular of both.So, in order to accommodate our esteemed photographers and the huge audience that they attract to 360Cities with their panoramas, we've created a new section (we call it an "area") called "Out of this World" for panoramas like these.Don't let the fact that these panoramas are being placed at the Earth's South Pole fool you - we had to put them somewhere in order not to interfere with our Panoramic World.Welcome aboard on a journey "Out of this World".
