NASA's future Mars robot will take the fastest pictures yet of the red planet

Currently, to plan out a day's worth of work on Curiosity, it takes scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) about eight hours to first process information gathered by the rover the day before, plan out the next day's tasks, engineer those projects, bundle them up in digital instructions, and send more instructions back to Mars. Engineers spend about a half hour to an hour alone processing the images that Curiosity sends back, stitching together wide angle photos, or lining up stereo images that let humans--or rovers--deduce information about depth from two-dimensional pictures. "For things like driving or operating the arm, we take a picture with the left camera and a picture with the right camera" Justin Maki, the imaging scientist for Mars 2020, says. "Then we match up pixels between the two images to create a 3D image of the terrain. Because we have these wider field of view lenses, we end up with better quality stereo terrain maps."