‘Incredible’: A 360 degree view from the surface of Mars goes viral but not as it seems

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As successful as NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars, it has created a huge online buzz among space enthusiasts, who can’t wait to capture images of the Red Planet. Now, a 360-degree view from the surface of Mars has gone viral, leaving much of the soil with an amazing sky lit up with zillions of stars – the only problem is that it’s photoshopped and not real.

Hugh Hou, a U.S. videographer who specializes exclusively in 360-degree imagery, recently created a 360-degree artistic scene and the stunning creation received over 1.6 million shares on Facebook. To make the experience valuable, Hou persuaded netizens to wear their VR headsets while experiencing “What the surface of Mars looks like”. The artist said the scene was created by stitching six separate images taken by NASA ‘s Perseverance Mars rover on February 20, 2021.

Although in the long description, the artist explains: “The skies do not represent the real skies from Mars”, most people did not pay attention to him. As the image went viral, the fact that it was “deceptive” and “false” bothered many online people, who later said that they felt “deceptive”.

“Disclaimer: the sky is not full in the original image, I edited the skies to get a full 360 experience inside a VR headset like Oculus Quest 2,” he said in a comment. “This is art,” he explained again.

Now, just in case you’re wondering what it’s like to stand on Mars, NASA’s JPL released a video of the 360-degree high view of a landing site – the Jezero Crater – as captured by the rover’s color navigation cameras, or Navcams. Unlike Hou’s version, in the NASA video the Red Plant sky appears to be hazy and in rusty scenes.

NASA’s Mars 2020 durability rover made its first high-definition sight around its new home in Jezero Crater on Feb. 21, after turning its mast, or “head,” 360 degrees, allowing the Mastcam-Z instrument to capture the rover at first sight after they hit the Red Planet, ”NASA wrote in a press release.

The U.S. space agency has released the first image of the panorama taken by Mastcam-Z, a pair of accessible cameras aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. “The panorama was sewn together on Earth from 142 individual images taken on Sol 3, the third Martian day of the mission (February 21, 2021),” he said in a statement.

NASA said it will use these mast cameras to determine which rocks are worth sampling and what should be collected and returned to Earth in the future.

The main goal of the Perseverance mission on Mars is astrobiology, including finding traces of microbial old life. The rover will mark the geology of the planet and the climate of the past, pave the way for human study of the Red Planet, and will be the first mission to collect Martian rock and regolith and accumulate (broken rock and dust).

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