areoHDR

With HDR, the images glow brightly in high contrast on the screen, not visible here in the screenshots as it can only be experienced on the device. The areoHDR app shows images taken only a few hours ago on planet Mars by NASA Perseverance Rover, which landed on 18 February 2021 and is currently driving in and around Jezero Crater. Since version 1.5.0 all color images taken by Viking Lander 1 & 2 are also available. Viking Lander 1 touched down on 20 July 1976 as first successful landing on another planet.

This is currently the only app showing real Mars images in high dynamic range (HDR) and color calibrated for human vision to bring the experience, human explorers on Mars would have themselves, to iPhone and iPad. To navigate through the sols (days on Mars since landing) and images of each sol, either tap on the two up/down buttons on the right side or swipe horizontally or vertically or rotate the wheel with the sol numbers. Double tap or pinch with two fingers to zoom in and out.

The images are taken by the 20 Megapixel Navcam pair inside the rover's "head" 2m above the surface, the two 20MP front and rear Hazcam pairs near the ground, Watson Camera on the robotic arm and Cachecam in the underside sample storage bay.

A Mars calendar ist now available by long press on the arrow-down button where the day on Mars (sol) can be selected via the position in the astronomical solar year or the date on Earth.

HDR works on all iPhone & iPad Pro models released since late 2018 and all Macbook Pro since M1. Other devices will also show the images, but not in full HDR.

No AI processing is applied to the images and no artificial color adjustment. This is the real view on Mars! The color processing uses a preset white-balance set to sunny daylight on Earth, to visualize the experience a human explorer would have on the Mars surface. That is the same configuration available on any commercial digitial camera when setting it to manual daylight white-balance.

The raw image data used to produce the color processed images is publicly provided by NASA / JPL-Caltech. The color processed images shown by the App are separate derived data products and created by the app author's backend system.

The free version allows access to the latest 200 sols (days on Mars since landing). By subscribing within the app, you can access all more than 1500 Mars-days since landing sol 0. The standard Apple Terms of Use apply for this app: https://apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula