360-degree panoramic image of the Martian landscape surrounding NASA’s Curiosity. Credit: Andrew Bodrov
After seeing all the amazing imagery so far from NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, I know everyone wants to go there and take in the visual treats of Gale Crater. With the help of a 360-degree panorama you can virtually explore Curiosity’s landing site; sort of like a Martian version of Google’s Street View.
Take a martian minute to explore the panorama at 360pano.eu.
Photographer Andrew Bodrov stitched together images from Curiosity’s navigation cameras to create the panorama. “After seeing some of the stitches of Curiosity’s images at NASA’s website, I decided to stitch the panorama myself,” Bodrov told Universe Today.
He uses PTGui panoramic stitching software from New House Internet Services BV (http://www.ptgui.com) to create the 360-degree view of the mountains and sky surrounding the car-sized rover that successfully landed on Mars on August 6th.
“NASA has still not published enough source material to assemble a complete panorama in color,” Bodrov says. He used a color filter to make the images more representable. He also added that the sky and sun in the panorama were added in Adobe Photoshop. He used the size of the Sun seen in this spectacular image of a Martian sunset from NASA’s Spirit rover taken in 2005 as a guide.
While Bodrov says the high-resolution images themselves are amazing, just seeing a picture of another world is more inspiring. “It’s very nice to see the achievements of humanity which allows you to see a picture of another world,” he said.
Bodrov says he has more than 12 years experience creating panoramas including an awesome panorama (complete with sound) for the Russian Federal Space Agency of a Soyuz/Progress launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in August 2011.
Image caption: Planet Baikonur courtesy of Andrew Bodrov
This is so amazing! Imagine a true colour 360 view!
Kudos to the Curiosity team. I get the feeling I’m standing on Mars. This is going to be one exciting mission of discovery.
Andrew Bodrovs work is amazing, i could have zoomed around this 360 panorama for hours. Its a totally great way of exploring Mars and Curiosity in fine detail. Great link WOW
and not a single crater anywhere to be seen…not even a small one? There must be a very good explanation why? Is there no craters on Mars?
Did ET take this picture ? It’s from third person view.
The mast was edited out while stitching the panorama
Come on , Nasa has made panoramas since 1997 from Mars.
I presented the first Spirit Panorama 2 hours after it was available at NASA in 2004.
There are many available at http://www.panoramas.dk/mars. Among them also the same black/white one from the navigation camera as Andrew made from Curiosity. That was in januar 2004. The last 2 from 2005 and 2012 are in HD quality and in flash.