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"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible,” Einstein once said and today, with man-made machines landing on Mars seemingly every month, with photos and panoramas of the Martian landscape on our televisions and computer screens, Einstein’s statement doesn’t seem quite as outlandish to me as it once did.

I’ve long been plagued with existential angst, seeking answers to questions that have historically proved answerless: Is life a lucky fluke? Are there zillions of different, or perhaps parallel, universes out there? Would I recognize an alien life form if I happened into one? And what the heck is life, anyway?

Are we the masters of our own creation, or pond scum?

Alas, the exploration of Mars has yet to provide any answers and it’s unlikely it will anytime soon. It has, however, provided us with a sometimes-eerie view of a barren and desolate landscape and delighted us with our own advances in modern technology. And being Canadian, I’m proud of our technical donation to the project.

The CCD image sensor chips onboard the two Mars Exploration Rover (MER) missions were manufactured by Dalsa at its semiconductor division in Bromont, Quebec. Dalsa, based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, makes cinema-quality video components and other high-end imaging devices and was called on to make the CCDs for the Pancam and the other cameras on Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity.

The chips are critical components in the nine electronic cameras aboard the two identical Rovers. The stereo pair of CCD cameras is located on a "camera bar" that sits on top of the mast of the Rover and is responsible for taking high-resolution views of the surface and sky through eight different colored filters. Pancam's mast assembly allows it to rotate a complete 360 degrees while the camera bar itself can swing up or down through 180 degrees of elevation. This allows the cameras to generate stunning panoramic image mosaics as large as 4,000 pixels high by 24,000 pixels around, equivalent to a 96-megapixel image.

NASA officials say the camera shows what a human with 20-20 vision would see on the surface of Mars. The Pancam does not make a color picture directly but records light versus dark in shades of gray. A series of filters, one each recording red, green and blue light, are then applied to gather multiple images that are then blended together with special software to create a color picture. (For an interesting overview on how the camera works, read ‘How Spirit Makes Great Photos’.)

And speaking of great photos, Hans Nyberg of panoramas.dk was one of the first to produce a QuickTime VR of the Mars mission and the first to post it in fullscreen. (The first panorama was made by David Palermo of worldvr.com.) In fact, Nyberg has posted all his fullscreen panos of Mars mere hours after NASA released the photos.

- First fullscreen QTVR from Mars (Jan 13th)

- Mars Spirit leaves the mothership, Black and white cubic panorama (Jan 18th)

- Mars Pathfinder 1997 panorama (Jan 18th)

- Mars Opportunity, view from the ‘back’ of Mars (Feb 2nd)

- David Palermo's Mars panoramas

All the raw images, along with panoramas, press releases and other pertinent information is posted at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Library website.

And if you’re tired of Mars yet still interested in NASA-related images and projects, be sure to visit Jim Spadaccini’s (of Ideum.com) Sun-Earth Viewer. Developed along with NASA’s Sun-Earth Connection Education Forum, the Sun-Earth Viewer lets users view, zoom and compare real-time NASA satellite images, and interviews with scientific and cultural experts.