Explore Mars One Pixel at a Time

GigaPixel Image Takes You to the Red Planet

The Mars Curiosity Rover is sending back images and data every day from the surface of the Red Planet. Images you can explore!

Wow.  I had to stop and think about that sentence for a moment to capture the full feeling of it.  It’s a scenic panorama FROM Mars. Those of you who have grown up with missions to Mars might feel a bit jaded about this, although I never get tired of seeing Mars and I’ve been exploring it all my life.

Yes, we’ve been sending missions to Mars for decades now. Each one has told us more and more about the planet. Each one got me excited that maybe someday we’d be walking on Mars, scuffing our booted feet along on the dusty surface. Well, that will come. In time. Today, however, you can take a virtual tour of the Red Planet that does everything BUT let you scuff your boots along and kick rocks.  It’s the billion-pixel view released from JPL.  This is a reduced version of a panorama of the view from the Rocknest site where Curiosity was sitting when it took the image of Mt. Sharp in the distance. The fullsized pan is nearly 900 images stitched together to give you the best  wide-angle living-room window view of Mars yet. The image above is a reduced-size version, but you can pan and zoom around the full image by visiting the gigapixel image site.  Check it out and do a little Mars exploration of your own!