Mankind may not be able to set foot on Mars just yet, but NASA has brought us the next best thing: Letting you explore the Jezero Crater without leaving the planet.
This is done through two new online interactive experiences made by the space agency to allow users to check out the landing site and exploration locale used by the Perseverance rover.
The first new experience is titled Explore with Preserverence and allows users to follow the titular Mars rover on its journey on the Red Planet.
This public-friendly reconstruction of the Martian surface is done through the images taken by Preserverance itself, as well as additional images taken by the HiRISE (High-Resolution Imaging Experiment) camera on the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, with the 3D tool based on a more simplified and user-friendly version of the Advanced Science Targeting Tool for Robotic Operations (ASTTRO) that the Perseverance team utilizes to find points of interest on the Martian surface to study.
“It’s the best reconstruction available of what Mars looks like,” Parker Abercrombie, a senior software engineer who is leading the software development at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement, adding that they plan to update it regularly and help understand what Mars looks like as if the viewer were there.
“It’s a unique challenge to set things up so people can browse in a way they’ll understand since users have varying experiences in using 3D environments,” Abercrombie said. “This is a great opportunity for the public to follow along with the mission, using the same type of visualization tools as the mission scientists.”
A similar interactive experience also exists for NASA's Curiosity rover.
The second new experience is titled Where is Preserverane?, and shows where the titular rover and the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter are on their respective explorations, with the locations updated after every drive and flight.
Also based on ASTTRO technology, the experience is designed to make sure the user gets data almost as fast as the engineers and scientists do. It shows the routes and stopping points with markers, and indicates where their next stop might be. This provides a terrain map, which is what scientists use to try and find possible signs of extraterrestrial life.
The experiences come as the widely-anticipated Preserverance mission continues, with a heavy focus being on astrobiology, including looking for signs of ancient life and studying the planet's geology and pave the way for human exploration. The rover has already collected the first Martian rock sample ever taken, and NASA hopes to retrieve it and many other samples taken by the rover in the near future.