In 2020 we will have a new rover on the surface of Mars. The vehicle will reach the red planet endowed with a whopping 23 cameras and an important novelty: its main camera will be able for the first time to take photos at a resolution of 20 megapixels and full color.
Yes, oddly enough, we have never seen Mars in its real color. All the cameras that incorporate the rovers and probes that we have taken there take black and white photos. The closest thing we have to a real image of Mars are reconstructions of the color of the black and white photos based on the wavelength data recorded by other sensors. Similarly, the panoramas we see of Mars are not a single photo, but several carefully pasted by NASA technicians. That is the reason why sometimes inevitable aberrations are seen as rover instruments in several places at once.
The main camera of the rover at a scale of 1: 1. Photo: NASA / JPL
There is a good reason why we resort to small and black and white photos when any mobile has better cameras. Taking color photos at a high resolution means that you have to transmit much larger files to the Earth. NASA has solved this by improving compression technology. Previous rovers such as Pathfinder or Curiosity compressed the images using the main processor. The 2020 rover integrates chips dedicated to that work in the camera itself. Your lens has also been enhanced to a wide angle, so you will have to connect fewer images to get an overview of your surroundings.
Finally, repeater technology has been improved using probes currently in orbit over Mars as MAVEN or the ESO TGO. Now it is possible to send more data for a longer time.
The rest of the cameras of the new rover fulfill other functions than taking photographs. Many of them are HazCams, operational cameras that serve the Rover to analyze and remove obstacles. Others serve to operate the robotic arm, and even carries a new internal camera whose function is to take pictures very close to the samples it collects. When Pathfinder landed on Mars in 1997, it had five cameras on board. Curiosity Rover is 17. The 23 eyes of the new rover promise to show us Mars as we have never seen and unravel even more of its mysteries.