Landscape Poetry
Contributed by Corrine Rojas
On Sol 422, Mastcam-Z took this image during a routine dust devil atmospheric imaging activity. Here you see the Jezero crater delta front to the left and the Seítáh area leading toward the landing site to the right. I didn’t know that the the serene-like rover tracks traversing in the middle would be perfectly centered in this frame, a wonderful coincidence. You see layers of mountains on the far side of Jezero crater disappearing into the dusty atmosphere in the distance. A familiar sight on a windy day in a dusty region here on Earth. The sand dunes in the foreground with neatly manicured boulders lay in patterns manipulated by the Martian wind over time, disturbed only recently by the fresh tracks of the rover.
To me, this image is symbolic of a brief moment of reflection of how far our fearless roving explorer has come in over 400 sols since landing on the dusty red planet. Perseverance has recently broken a few long distance driving records, including its first multiple-sol drive (sols 350-352). Also, while entirely too small to actually see with the constraints of the resolution of this image, Ingenuity is also located somewhere in the footprint of this frame. The Mastcam-Z cameras are first and foremost a scientific camera suite, but they can surely take a poetic landscape shot!
April 28, 2022