See Mars Like Never Before! NASA's Perseverance Rover Sends New Video and Images of the Red Planet

originally posted by: Archivalist

Also, those asking if I've seen Curiosity's images, I have viewed well over 200,000 Curiosity images.

I've viewed at least 200,001 Curiosity images!

Apologies, I just couldn't resist... but on a more serious note, I do think the zoomable Mastcams of Perseverance are a major step ahead. Imagine the panoramas that can be stitched together, even if Percy is still like 300-400 meters away, it can still make out an object the size of a house fly.

I'd say that's quite a game changer...

Panorama of Mars from Perseverance Rover.

originally posted by: shaneslaughta
a reply to: Archivalist

We really need a pre-programmed autonomous rover that can be sent there. Then it can carry out its programming faster and send back data on a semi continuous basis.

It had enough autonomy, programming, and processing power to find its own best landing spot after photographing the ground as it was falling towards it, then comparing that photograph to an existing map to pick the best landing solution (smoothest, safest landing spot in the immediate area around it).

It also has some autonomy while roving. As ArMaP mentioned, this rover, as well as Curiosity Rover, have built-in semi-autonomy to be able to identify a potential hazard and find the best path around that hazard.

Perseverance actually has more driving autonomy than Curiosity. But no, it doesn't go wherever it wants. The science team at JPL look for interesting targets and then gives the rover a general path to that target. The rover then (on its own) selects the best path to take to that target. If the general path given by JPL happens to have a dangerous rock or sand pit in the way, Perseverance knows enough to avoid those hazards on its own.

Which is helpful, since there is a speed-of-light delay in messages back and forth that is currently 11 minutes (ranges from 4 minutes to 24 minutes depending on how far mars is from earth). So the people at JPL can't be waiting for Perseverance to tell it there is something in the way. It could take 24 minutes for a message from Perseverance saying "there's a rock in my way" to get to earth, then have the person back on Earth figure out a path around the rock, then have another 24 minute speed-of-light time delay for the new instructions to get back to Perseverance -- as you can see, that would make traveling on Mars way too slow.

So instead the rover itself can find the best path, on its own, semi-autonomously.

originally posted by: Archivalist
So at this point, a few Mastcam-Z images have come through, and they don't look very promising to me.

Depending on when you looked, the full-resolution version of the Mastcam-Z photo you saw might not have been downloaded yet. Don’t forget, the bandwidth between Earth and Mars is quite small, so a full-resolution image takes a long time to download.

Sometimes the first thing that appears on the raw-image library is a lower-resolution thumbnail. The full res version might have still been coming when you wrote that.

I say this because there are many very high resolution Mastcam-Z images in the raw image library right now, but there are some low-res ones there as well.

The high resolution ones are quite incredible, so I doubt those are the ones you say are not promising.

originally posted by: Archivalist
Fortunately, it looks like the Mastcam can take variable resolution photos, so perhaps the highest resolution images are still to come.

The physical resolution of the sensors is the same as the ones in Curiosity's MastCam, and they can change resolution in the same they did with Curiosity, by reducing it from 1600 x 1200 to something else (obviously) smaller.
The main difference is the zoom lens both Mastcam-Z on Perseverance have.

You can see the cameras' specs here.