Its a little more fish eye....

Good guess, VikingMars !
It's very flat, at least in the direction where we can see the horizon.
Most of the rocks that are showing appear to be embedded in dusty regolith.

Is this a crater? Far right, top.

Second image was with a compression on the green of 50% and 75% compression on the blue band, follow it with RGB manually equalized.

Original sized photos, via CNSA: http://www.cnsa.gov.cn/n6759533/c6812021/content.html

And CONGRATULATIONS for the Chinese for having landed their spacecraft on Mars with success at their first try
This is a GREAT technological and human feat ! They deserve great tributes

BRAVO BRAVO BRAVO to the Chinese! What a great achievement!

There are three rovers on Mars now... Wow!!


... Where are you, Rosalind Franklin...

Thomas as usual quickly made a great image, but here's a few other re-mappings.
Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

Congrats to the Chinese team.

(Edited - use higher-resolution sources per post upthread a bit)

Got any parameters for the calibration of the avoidance camera?

Xiunhua News Agency has reported which cameras were used for the first two pictures.

1. The Black & White image was taken by an obstacle avoidance camera installed on front of the rover. As is obvious, it confirms that the rover's descent ramp on the lander has been extended to the surface.

2. The color image was taken by the navigation camera fitted to the rear of the rover. Used to confirm deployment of the rover's 4 articulated solar panels and antenna.

Nothing specific, no. Figured I'd look it up later, for now just tried a few things in Hugin that looked about right with the horizon and other lines...(FWIW used full-frame-equiv. focal length in 14-20mm range).

Thank you very much Kenny

It is possible to generate a terrain using the avoidance photos. If we have the right calibration. I will try to get this calibration using the yutu-2 avodance camera, mabe they are similar.

I stretched the area near the horizon to try to interpret the surface features a bit better. From the illumination I think the view is roughly to the south (may be SE or SW). A few of those bright drifts are visible beyond a rocky area. Not enough in this to locate it yet.
Phil
Click to view attachment

Thank you Phil. Also, maybe that MRO has already imaged Zhurong on its landing site

On the b&w image there is a dark band just in front of the bright patches near the horizon that appears to be lined with rocky debris,
especially on the right hand side. Wonder if are looking at a subdued crater rim here.

This Youtube video is a presentation in Chinese about site selection work done at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. There are some interesting pictures, one showing ellipses on a hazard map (I think).

Phil

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEmjzReJ-IA

The locations of the ellipses in that presentation. The actual landing was in the left-hand ellipse.

Phil

Click to view attachment

The rover has rolled off the lander's deck onto Martian surface earlier today at 02:40 UTC.

Official press release

Thank you, Cosmic Penguin - it's very good to see you here.

The view from half way down the ramp is interesting - looking approximately north, I think, and there is some significant relief on the horizon. Here's a stretched version of the image to show it with some exaggeration, making distant features a bit easier to interpret.

Click to view attachment

Phil

Sequence of additional photos taken by all 4 HazCams (one pair each at the front and back) of the rover driving off the ramps, via CCTV:

Link

EDIT - in GIF form

Here's the accompanying graphic showing the layout of the deployment...

Click to view attachment

The national flag is clearly seen on the graphic. It appears to be a little fabric flag, unrolled. You can see it from different angles in the two rearward-looking photos from the rover after deployment.

Stereo view

That's great Zhurong rover made it to the ground!
I made this montage yesterday, actually I can now update it with a picture with Zhurong wheels on the martian surface.
4 pictures taken by 4 robots the same day (15 May) on Mars.

I haven't seen these images posted in this quality before (admittedly, it doesn't look like the original quality). It seems to alternate back-and-forth between left and right rear HazCams.
(I've done everything I know how to try to organize this by file name, but that didn't work, and I can't seem to get the formatting right through insert-in-post, so you're left with this monstrosity ... )

From here are some higher-quality rear HazCam and front HazCam left-right sets. Any idea what the dark (apparently-)linear features are to either side of the rear hazcam images are? They're about half-way up the image and on the far edges of both. I originally thought it might be some out-of-focus instrumentation on the rover, but they don't show up in other rear hazcam images, and the left-right set doesn't seem to show the sort of displacement one would expect if they weren't actual surface features on the ground.

Finally I found some higher-quality versions of the forward hazcam(s).

Thanks for posting these.
They appear to be real features on the ground - compare the one on the right with the dark rock near its left tip. In other frames they should be out of the frame due to the change in perspective.

I'm guessing they're blast features from the landing.

Animation of Zhurong roving down the ramp as seen by "Hazcam" left.

Click to view attachment

And the same as seen by "Hazcam" right.

Click to view attachment

And more one colored... not good ... but has colors....

I also corrected the distorsion to flatten the horizon.
Animation from left "Hazcam":
Click to view attachment

And animation from right "Hazcam":
Click to view attachment

It would be nice to have an early or late day image to determine the ramp orientation (N, S, E, W)
My guess is South (season, local noon-ish, latitude, shadows)
???

Of course it won't happen, but for my amusement, I've been imagining the possibility of a helicopter trip by Ingenuity to the location of the Zhurong rover. This Nature article

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-...ontent=deeplink

suggests they are less than 1000 km apart. It seems Ingenuity can fly at a speed of 15 km/hr. Assuming it flies ~3 hours per day, it seems the trip would take less than a month. Vive le difference between ground speed and air speed!

[EDIT] The distance is closer to 1860 km, according to a lat/lon calculator, so it would take twice as long. Less amusing.

So I can't help noticing that the landing leg facing the ramp is...well...fuzzy. Insulation? Doesn't seem to be present on the leg to the right.

Also, the pad for that leg seems to be almost precariously perched on one or more rocks. Obviously--and fortunately--it was seated well enough to work for offload.

PDP8E: "My guess is South (season, local noon-ish, latitude, shadows)"

That was my guess as well. Approximately south.

Phil

Unlike the American landers, Zhurong's lander used a single, lunar module-like engine. I imagine the non-disbursed plume created one of the dustiest landing ever. This may account for the lander's ragged-looking appearance.

Here's some approximately reprojected horizon crops. I think the field of view is about 120 deg, but can't really be sure.
Fhaz (south?)
Click to view attachment
Rhaz (north?)
Click to view attachment
My guess is southeast part of the circle I drew on the map thread.

Seems like there is less scour under the Zhurong lander than either InSight or Phoenix (which had clustered nozzles).

I do notice two dark patches, roughly equidistant either side of the lander, and wondered if they were related to plume impingement from something

Seems like there is some ragged-looking insulation on the landing legs. (In fact thermal shielding to protect the Apollo landing gear from plume heating was an issue late in that design)

Greenish made those nice horizon images, and here I have reprojected them to focus on the distant features with the hope of identifying something on the CTX images. Not very easy! I thought the Fhaz view was to the south (as shown here) with roughly noon illumination, bur reprojecting like this makes me feel that the view might be oriented more towards the SE with mid-morning illumination. The distant bright spots are obviously the bright dunes or ripples which show up in the CTX image, and there is a little bit of relief on the horizon, but no luck yet finding a match. A full Navcam panorama will help a lot.

Phil

Click to view attachment

"Upcoming events
18th May 2021: First images (Done)
22nd May 2021: China’s Mars rover Zhurong will roll down (Done).
27th May 2021: China likes selfies. Like the photo sessions of Yutu-1&2 with the Chang’e-3&4 landers on the Moon also Zhurong will do a photo session between rover and the descent module (Sol 13)." I didn't saw yet any camera on the lander.

Click to view attachment

Nicely done Roman! It gives relief to the seemingly two bright dunes.
As we wait new color pictures taken by Zhurong and its landing platform, here is a colorization of one of the Hazcam pics.
Colors on the platform have been added on the basis of videos posted on chinese networks as this one.

We must keep in mind that sun light colors are absorbed by their wavelength, this due to the size of the atmospheric particles. The smallest particles will absorb small wavelengths, that goes like the rainbow, from likely blue to likely red. N2(78% of earth atm) from earth has a kinetic diameter of 364pm, CO2(95% of mars atm) is 330pm, and all martian pics has dificult dealing with the RGB Levels. Theorectly we should get on a perfect equalized pic a light violet to blue sky... red to orange only with dust on the horizon...

Roman, that is really well done!

Does anyone have a source or more info on the physical dimensions of the rover (and landing platform)? I have found a few notes about the rover's 1.85m height - assume that's to top of mast on level ground. I've seen various renderings but no few actual dimensioned drawings or 3-views I could scale stuff from.

In particular at the moment I'm interested in height off ground of the images taken so far, including hazcams and the images before the rover "stood up" and rolled down the platform.

(Edit )
I have now found one view; source: Bin Zhou et al 2020. With this and other images (such as hi-res press rendering here)I estimate the obstacle avoidance cameras as ~700-750mm above nominal ground level.
Would of course welcome more resources.
Click to view attachment

What do you mean by « atmospheric particles »? If you’re referring to molecules in the atmosphere, then that’s not absorption but scattering. Rayleigh scattering is proportional to 1/(lambda^4), hence shorter wavelength radiations are more scattered that longer wavelength radiations.

Indeed, it is a group of factors including Rayleigh and Mie Scattering, concentration and size, i wrongly used the term absortion: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/atmos/blusky.html But this term is indeed used a lot together with scatter: "Though the atmospheric particles scatter violet more than blue (450-nm light), the sky appears blue, because our eyes are more sensitive to blue light and because some of the violet light is absorbed in the upper atmosphere": https://www.livescience.com/32511-why-is-the-sky-blue.html

Here is a re-projection with labeled approximate horizontal distance, measured from the ground point under the front obstacle avoidance cam.
Click to view attachment
Note: the oddly-offset grid is a bit of a hack, it's snipped and overlaid from the previewer in Hugin where I did the reprojection. Distance values are based on many assumptions and a few guesses (see caption on image... OK the whole thing is a hack, but I was curious.) Since the GPR antenna rods are about 1.3 m long, angled ~16 deg up, the math doesn't seem way off, at least up close.

While we're waiting on new information, why are the "yardangs"/dunes here in Utopia Planitia bright, while in Gale crater the sand dunes are dark?

The big dunes in Gale (Bagnold Dune Field etc.) and patches of sand caught in hollows are dark - probably because they are composed of basaltic grains. There are also many smaller dust drifts, especially earlier in the mission, such as Rocknest, which are finer material largely consisting of the typical bright reddish martian dust. Wind sorts the coarser and finer particles into separate structures rather than mixing them together. The Utopia region may lack sources for the darker material, but the brighter stuff is distributed planet-wide. Also look at Endeavour crater where Opportunity saw dark dunes inside Endeavour and lots of small bright drifts at the foot of the crater wall and elsewhere.

Phil

With success like Chang'e-4, chang'e-5 and Tianwen, im thinking why the countries don't exponentialize their space program, just sending others clone spaceships from success cases, to other moons and terrain bodies. I believe this goes within the idea behind chinese space program and SpaceX Falcon9 and StarShip, We just have so many places to land on the solar system, so much to learn, and a generation human life spam so small... Its time to use all of this to make a paradigm shift.