Raccoon
Is it just the Covid in me, or does the picture show a masked raccoon face on Mars?
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (JBC) are planning to pop a "Super Hi-Vision Camera" with 4K and 8K capabilities onboard JAXA's 2024 mission to Mars. While 4K and 8K might sound everso whizzy to those Earth dwellers squinting at HD (or less) television, boffins have already …
Japan Broadcasting Corporation is the offical international name of Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai, but it's known locally and internationally as NHK, not JBC.
Around 2006, NHK sent a 4K Super Hi-Vision camera around the moon on a JAXA probe and I think it's still the only natively UHD footage from beyond LEO. If you've never seen 8K UHD, it's hard to describe just how realistic these images are going to look. I'm wondering how they've got over the bandwidth/compression challenge of getting this video back from Mars in a timely fashion.
A pint of Asahi to the boffins at JAXA and NHK.
"ESA and NASA plan an altogether more convoluted Mars sample return mission, which will see NASA's Mars 2020 rover select and deposit samples on the Martian surface. An ESA Sample Fetch Rover will then collect the samples on a later mission and return them to a Mars Ascent Vehicle, which will carry the samples into orbit around Mars. A final spacecraft, ESA's Earth Return Orbiter, will then bring the samples back to Earth. What could possibly go wrong?"
Is that really any more unlikely than screaming through Mars' atmosphere, opening parachutes, then cutting the 'chutes loose to ride a rocket to the ground which then hovers over the surface while lowering the payload down on a winch cable?