This will probably be the closest you will ever come to standing on Mars and the most accurate and detailed image ever sent back from the Red Planet. NASA calls this the “Billion-Pixel View From Curiosity at Rocknest, Raw Color” and it is a full-circle view combined with nearly 900 images, all taken by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover.
The Rover created this panorama with “1.3 billion pixels in the full-resolution version” according to NASA’s official website. The view you see is pointed south, “with north at both ends”. This is the Curiosity Rover at the “Rocknest” site, the same spot where the rover gathered the samples of windblown dust and sand. NASA stated “Curiosity used three cameras to take the component images on several different days between Oct. 5 and Nov. 16, 2012”. This is a lower resolution shot so you get the idea, the full resolution shot is linked below.
The website also states, “This first NASA-produced gigapixel image from the surface of Mars is a mosaic using 850 frames from the telephoto camera of Curiosity’s Mast Camera instrument, supplemented with 21 frames from the Mastcam’s wider-angle camera and 25 black-and-white frames — mostly of the rover itself — from the Navigation Camera.”
You can interact with the image, like you are actually on Mars by visting the first link below, a full-resolution shot cab be found in the second link.
more info: nasa 1, nasa 2
