The camera is on a robotic arm that can swing around 360 degrees and look back on the rover. Mars is basically a red dusty desert with ice at the poles. It is cold there. The equator is right at freezing all the time. The poles are of course colder. It is however, the only planet in the solar system that man might can live on besides earth. It's atmosphere is almost all carbon dioxide though. We could grow plants in greenhouses there, but they would have to be filled with oxygen, or wait for the plants to produce oxygen in the greenhouses to breathe. We can make oxygen out of the carbon dioxide and/or the water from the poles. Mars has a 24 hour day, but it takes 2 years to go around the sun, so a Martian year is twice as long as an earth year. This rover has a laser to burn holes into a nearby mountain it is going to so it can see what mineral is under the surface.
I see the moon and Mars as future mining colonies, if the world lasts that long. The moon has a lot of platinum, aluminum, silicone and oxygen in the soil. Mars has iron and oxygen in the soil, and has water at the poles. They want to find out what other minerals Mars has.