The barren hills west of Jezero Crater
Click for full panorama.
Click for interactive map.
Cool image time! The panorama above, cropped and reduced to post here, was created on April 5, 2026 using 46 pictures taken by one of the high resolution camera’s on the Mars rover Perseverance. It also attempts to show this terrain in natural color.
The blue dot on the overview map to the right marks Perseverance’s present location. The green dot indicates where I think the rover was when the panorama was taken. (Note: I think the press release incorrectly lists the Sol number for these dates, but as I am not sure I can only guess.) The yellow lines indicate approximately the terrain seen in the full panorama.
As the press release notes, “the panorama offers one of the richest geological vistas of the rover’s mission, revealing a windswept landscape of diverse rock textures.” It also appears this is the direction the rover is presently headed.
I ask my readers to once again look at this panorama. It shows an utterly barren terrain. There is no life here, and if there ever was it was gone billions of years ago and never did much to shape the landscape. While some at NASA and in the planetary community like to tout the possibility of life on Mars in order to lobby for funding, the reality we see says there is none, and that life will only appear on Mars when humans finally arrive there to build new human societies.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Nice job Bob! I always enjoy your “cool images”.
Mars is smaller than Tellus. Its internal radioactive core, its heat core and thus its magnetic field producing core is gone. Giving the solar wind free reign to strip the planet of all the elements of an atmosphere that gravity can’t hold on to.
Mars is giving an early warning to us. Earth’s magnetic field is weakening (by 9% the past 200 years of measurement, some sources say). Like on Mars, the internal magneto will stop one day. And then what?
It looks exactly like the desert just a couple of miles west of the Nile, so there might be some surprises below the dust.
There are plenty of places here on Earth that look like that panorama. There might not be life there, but it says little about elsewhere.
(But I doubt there’s any life on Mars, at present.)
GWB wrote, “There are plenty of places here on Earth that look like that panorama.”
I disagree. You would be hard pressed to find many places on Earth so completely empty of any life. They do exist, but they are few and far between. Most are located in the arctic regions, but even there life can be found, if you look just a little more closely. On Mars we have looked down to a microscopic levels and have found nothing.