We’ve Never Seen Mars Quite Like This
When Corrine Rojas comes into work, Mars is waiting for her. She drives to the office, grabs a cup of coffee, and then pulls up the latest dispatches from Perseverance, a car-size NASA rover situated inside a crater in Mars’s northern hemisphere. Rojas, an operations engineer at Arizona State University, checks that the rover’s main cameras are working well, and that they took the shots scientists back home had asked for. Then, she basks in the wondrous sights of our celestial neighbor. “I am often the first person to lay eyes on photos from Mars taken by the rover,” Rojas told me.
And Mars has been looking particularly good lately. That’s not to say, it has remained mostly unchanged . The difference is us, and particularly the Perseverance mission, which has captured some of the sharpest views of the Martian surface to date. The rover’s job is to search for potential in the rock, but since it arrived last February, it has become quite the landscape photographer.
