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Perseverance "video" from Mars.

(Science Week, day 5!)

Captured over two hours and 35 minutes, 53 Navigation Camera (Navcam) image pairs were combined with rover data on orientation, wheel speed, and steering angle, as well as data from Perseverance's Inertial Measurement Unit, and placed into a 3D virtual environment.

No big deal, every previous generation of humans that's ever lived: direct imagery from the surface of Mars is completely normal these days.

Maps of Mars are pretty detailed now. Cameras orbit the place, and we've even sort of been able to "hear" what it's like there.

But video, as even today's youngest smartphone users must know, takes much more space and bandwidth than pictures. So it's very cool to have this file: not exactly video shot from a smartphone, but beautifully assembled from those regularly-taken photos from the front of the Perseverance rover.

(It's been about five years since it touched down, by the way!)