The camera is capable of focusing on any target at distances of about 0.8 inch (2.1 centimeters) to infinity.
The main purpose of Curiosity's MAHLI camera is to acquire close-up, high-resolution views of rocks and soil at the rover's Gale Crater field site. Images taken without the dust cover in place are expected during checkout of the robotic arm in coming weeks. The image is murky because the MAHLI's removable dust cover is apparently coated with dust blown onto the camera during the rover's terminal descent. (The team calls this day Sol 1, which is the first Martian day of operations Sol 1 began on August 6, 2012.) In the distance, the image shows the north wall and rim of Gale Crater. This view of the landscape to the north of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity was acquired by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on the afternoon of the first day after landing. The MSL Rover named Curiosity is equipped with a nuclear-powered lab capable of vaporizing rocks and ingesting soil, measuring habitability, and whether Mars ever had an environment able to support small life forms called microbe. The original image from MARDI has been geometrically corrected to look flat.
Full resolution (1,600 by 1,200 pixel) images will be returned to Earth over the next several months as Curiosity begins its scientific exploration of Mars. The resolution of all of the MARDI frames is reduced by a factor of eight in order for them to be promptly received on Earth during this early phase of the mission. It is among the first color images Curiosity sent back from Mars. It was obtained two and one-half minutes before touching down on the surface of Mars and about three seconds after heat shield separation. The image was obtained by the Mars Descent Imager instrument known as MARDI and shows the 15-foot (4.5-meter) diameter heat shield when it was about 50 feet (16 meters) from the spacecraft. 6 EDT) and transmitted to Spaceflight Operations Facility for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. This color thumbnail image was obtained by NASA's Curiosity rover during its descent to the surface of Mars on August 5 PDT (Aug. In fact, they make an arrow pointing to Curiosity.
The darkened radial jets from the sky crane are downrange from the point of oblique impact, much like the oblique impacts of asteroids.
Around the rover, this disturbance was from the sky crane thrusters, and forms a bilaterally symmetrical pattern. Relatively dark areas in all four spots are from disturbances of the bright dust on Mars, revealing the darker material below the surface dust. The large, reduced-scale image points out the strewn hardware: the heat shield was the first piece to hit the ground, followed by the back shell attached to the parachute, then the rover itself touched down, and finally, after cables were cut, the sky crane flew away to the northwest and crashed. The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera captured this image about 24 hours after landing. The four main pieces of hardware that arrived on Mars with NASA's Curiosity rover were spotted by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) in this photograph released by NASA August 7, 2012.