NASA's Perseverance rover has captured a detailed 360-degree panorama of Mars' Jezero Crater, exploring the history of an ancient river delta. The color-enhanced image, which consists of 993 individual photos, helps scientists analyze the Martian landscape under lighting conditions similar to those on Earth.

The 360-degree panorama of Mars captured by the Perseverance rover features 2.38 billion pixels from Jezero Crater, providing insight into Mars' ancient river delta history.

After 1,000 days of exploration on Mars, NASA's Perseverance rover is studying rocks that show several eras in the history of a river delta billions of years ago. Scientists are investigating the area on Mars, known as Jezero Crater, to see if they can find evidence of ancient life in the rocks.

Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley led everyone through the detailed panorama of the rover's location captured by the Mastcam-Z instrument in November 2023.

The 360-degree mosaic panorama, made up of 993 individual images and 2.38 billion pixels, looks in all directions from a location the rover science team calls "Mount Airy." Part of the rover itself is visible in the scene, which appears more distorted at the edges as a result of image processing.

Color enhancement processing of images increases contrast and highlights color differences. This adjustment allows mission scientists to use everyday experience to interpret the landscape by approximating the scene under Earth's lighting conditions. The landscape on Mars would be darker and redder. Explore and download the panorama at: https://go.nasa.gov/3tmJnGB.

Video commentary (Ken Farley, Perseverance rover project scientist)

After experiencing countless sunrises on Mars, this is where NASA's Perseverance rover is now exploring: a billion-year-old river environment that tells the dynamic story of the forces that shaped it. Let's take a tour of the area and see where we'll send the rover next.

Perseverance is exploring Jezero Crater, which once contained an ancient lake and river system. If microorganisms once lived here, traces of them may be preserved in these rocks.

About 3.5 billion years ago, a river carved a canyon on the edge of the crater. Water poured into the crater and sand and gravel were deposited, forming a delta. On Earth, the record of such an ancient river and lake has long been erased. That's why sending robotic probes like Perseverance is so important: Mars is a special place that holds a unique record of what happened in the first billion years of the solar system.

In this area, different rock layers record different histories of the crater. Flat, light-colored rocks are deposited on the banks of a slowly flowing river.

The boulders in the distance were deposited later, probably by a raging torrent.

If this peculiar outcrop caught your attention, it caught ours too. It doesn't look like sediment at all - perhaps the remnants of a lava flow that has now mostly been eroded away. Laboratory equipment on Earth can precisely measure when volcanic rocks formed, so if we can send samples of these lavas back to Earth in the future, we might be able to tell when and how long the water flowed into Jezero.

From here, Perseverance will continue heading west. In the distance you can see the tops of the natural levees that form on the near and far banks of the river. The rover will pass through this area on its way upstream, continuing toward where the river cuts through the crater wall. From here you can see the canyon on the horizon.

Here, Perseverance will be in a good position to head south, up this natural slope, and up and out of the crater. We're lucky that the rover can safely travel along the edge where we need it to be.

The rover's climb will mark an exciting new phase of the mission: exploring rocks that are older than Jezero's rocks and were created in completely different ways. One tempting target are these light-colored rocks on the edge. They may have interacted with these fluids in hydrothermal environments, which is another exciting place to look for evidence of past life.

After completing its study of the crater floor, Perseverance has been climbing up the delta, piecing together the history of this once water-filled environment. In the past three years of exploration and sample collection, we have made great progress. However, there is much more to study.