Perseverance’s eyes see a different Mars

Enlarge / Perseverance's two Mastcam-Z imagers (in the gray boxes) are part of the rover's remote sensing mast. (credit: NASA)

The seven minutes of terror are over. The parachute deployed; the skycrane rockets fired. Robot truck goes ping! Perseverance, a rover built by humans to do science 128 million miles away, is wheels-down on Mars. Phew.

Percy has now opened its many eyes and taken a look around.

The rover is studded with a couple dozen cameras-25, if you count the two on the drone helicopter. Most of them help the vehicle drive safely. A few peer closely and intensely at ancient Martian rocks and sands, hunting for signs that something once lived there. Some of the cameras see colors and textures almost exactly the way the people who built them do. But they also see more. And less. The rover's cameras imagine colors beyond the ones that human eyes and brains can come up with. And yet human brains still have to make sense of the pictures the cameras send home.

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