Guide to NASA MARS Rover Curiosity's Cameras - MastCam

On the ground, the rover’s main workhorse cameras are the impressive MastCams.

Sitting 7 feet above the surface, these 2-megapixel cameras will provide color images and video of the surroundings.

Pictures taken with the MastCams will give you a feeling of what it’s like to stand on Mars, but with superhuman eyesight.

Different filters can be rotated in front of the MastCams, providing images in visible and near-infrared wavelengths.

The two nearly identical MastCams will combine to take 3-D stereo images. They can focus on objects as close as about 7 feet from the rover and see details down to roughly a few hundred microns.

They will see in “true color,” or approximately what your eyes would see if you were there with Curiosity.

Natural lighting on Mars tends to be slightly redder than on Earth because of the high amount of dust in the air.

So the rover will be taking images with a slight adjustment that gives them a warm, orangey glow similar to sunlight at sunset on Earth to capture this effect. The MastCams will also be taking images without this feature.

One of the biggest requests that scientists had for Curiosity was the addition of a telephoto lens.

The previous rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, could see details about as well as a person would on Mars.

But MastCam’s right camera has a 100-mm focal-length lens that provides three times the resolution of previous Mars rover cameras.

It can distinguish between a football and a basketball from seven football fields away.

While the left camera, with its 34-mm lens, can’t see as well, it will provide much wider views – about 15 degrees versus the right camera’s five degree field-of-view.

The MastCams can take full-color 360-degree panoramic images by stitching together 150 individual photos taken in a slowly rotating circle.

Finally, the cameras can also take 720p high-definition video at a rate of about 10 frames per second.