NASA Video Shares Curiosity's View Of Martian Sand Dunes

Mars is a desolate and lonely place that also happens to be quite beautiful. During the time, that NASA's massive Curiosity rover has been cruising the landscape of the Red Planet NASA has offered up some very cool images for us to check out. One of my favorite is the Curiosity Selfie at the top of this story. More recently, NASA has offered up a 360-degree video that Curiosity shot.

This is the perfect video to view using your Google Cardboard or any other virtual reality device since it is a full 360-degree view of the Martian surface. If you lack a Cardboard viewer or a VR helmet of some sort, don't fret you can still fire up the 360 video on your PC, it just won't be as awesome. This is as close as you can come to standing on the surface of Tatooine (or Mars for that matter).

Curiosity shot the video when it was sitting in the Bagnold Dune Field. Right behind the rover, you can see the Namib Dune where it was collecting soil samples for analysis a few weeks back. For scale, the closest dune is about 23-feet from Curiosity in this video.

Curiosity captured the video using the Mastcam back on December 18, 2015. Mastcam has two cameras inside that can take true color photos and videos with resolution for still images of 1600 x 1200. The video has to use hardware compression and offers 720p resolution at a sloth-like 10 fps. The video below is actually a slew of still images spliced together so it's more a giant panoramic image than a video. If you have a Google Cardboard viewer and a phone with a gyroscope just tap the Cardboard buttoned view the video by turning around.

SOURCE: Extremetech