<p>A tricked-out version of an off-the-shelf digital camera is able to identify, photograph, and even analyze patches of soil or rocks from afar and in extreme close-up, a feat that NASA's latest Mars rover Curiosity has yet to accomplish.</p><p>Researchers figured out how to take advantage of different lens adapters that can be mounted in front of a single camera to enable it to take images ranging from a macroscopic scalethink landscapeall the way down to a microscopic scalethink cells and bacteriathus spanning at least six orders of magnitude.</p><p>The new prototype, called the Astrobiological Imager, is described in the journal Astrobiology.</p><p>"For each scale, there is of course one or even several imagers that are superior to our instrument for that particular scale," says Wolfgang Fink, associate professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Arizona. "However, there is no instrument out there that can go across several orders of magnitude.</p><p><a href="http://www.futurity.org/point-shoot-camera-mars-rover-cant/">Keep reading...</a></p>