Still a Spacecraft: Landing Day through Sol 8 (1245 images, of which 626 full-res)

Even after touchdown, Perseverance was still, technically, a spacecraft, with the flight software that had steered the robot successfully from Earth to Mars still in control. The team spent a few sols on necessary initial activities like raising the high-gain antenna and mast, gathering the first panoramic views of the landscape, and performing other aliveness checks. Then they nursed the rover through a major operating system update, from its cruise flight software to the surface software that would give it the ability to rove, navigate, do science, and use its arm.

Because the cruise flight software had only rudimentary surface operations features, there are lots of idiosyncrasies in the image data from sols 0-4. Sequence identifiers often don't match between thumbnail and full-resolution Mastcam-Z images (because the cruise flight software did not "know" how to automatically make thumbnails from full-resolution Mastcam-Z images), and most sequences were simply named "AUT_04096." The headers below contain slighly modified sequence identifiers in these cases; I've identified those with an asterisk.