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Nasa's new Mars rover has returned its first 360-degree colour panorama1 from the surface of the Red Planet.
美宇航局新着陆的火星探测车发回了红色星球的首张360度全景彩色照片。
The Curiosity robot used its wideangle science camera placed high up on a mast to acquire the frames.
The low-resolution vista2 shows at centre the big mountain that lies in the middle of Gale3 Crater4, the deep depression in which the rover landed.
Curiosity's ultimate goal is to drive towards this peak - informally known as Mount Sharp - to study its rocks.
"This is a very low-resolution panorama(全景)," explained Mike Malin, the principal investigator5 on the rover's Mastcam cameras.
"The individual frames are only 144 by 144 pixels. There are 130 of them in there. It took us about an hour and six minutes to take the mosaic(马赛克,镶嵌).
"For the full-resolution panorama, the data volume will be 64 times larger, [and] the resolution will be eight times better. But this was pretty enough and interesting enough that we thought it was worth sharing with you guys," he told BBC News.
The colour is what the camera saw. Apart from the process of blending the individual frames, the only modification6 made was to brighten the image slightly.
Pictures are deliberately7 acquired underexposed(曝光不足的) so as not to saturate8 any bright regions in the field of view.
Rock target
The full-resolution frames are currently held in the camera memory, but at 2MB per shot it will take some time to get them all back on Earth.
Curiosity has two Mastcams. The one that took this panorama is a 34mm camera. The other camera has a 100mm telephoto lens. The two can be used together to make stereo pictures.
The Mastcams will be paramount9(最重要的) in helping10 to plan Curiosity's science mission, choosing where to drive and which rock targets to investigate.
Researchers want eventually to take the robot to the base of Mount Sharp.
Evidence from satellite photos has suggested there are sediments11 exposed at the base of the 5.5km-high peak that were laid down in the presence of abundant water.
The rover will use its instruments to try to understand what kind of environments existed at the time of the rocks' formation, and whether there were periods in Mars history when any type of microbial life could have thrived.
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