NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover used its Mast Camera, or Mastcam, to capture this 360-degree view on July 3, 2021, the 3,167th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The panorama is made up of 129 individual images that were sent to Earth, after which they are stitched together. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
A new video rings in the rover’s ninth year on Mars, letting viewers tour
Curiosity’s location on a Martian mountain.
Images of knobbly rocks and rounded hills are delighting scientists as
NASA’s Curiosity rover climbs Mount Sharp, a 5-mile-tall (8-kilometer-tall)
mountain within the 96-mile-wide (154-kilometer-wide) basin of Mars’ Gale
Crater. The rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, highlights those features in a
panorama captured on July 3, 2021 (the 3,167th Martian day, or sol, of the
mission).
This location is particularly exciting: Spacecraft orbiting
Mars show that Curiosity is now somewhere between a
region enriched with clay
minerals and one dominated by salty minerals called
sulfates. The mountain’s layers in this area may reveal how the ancient
environment within Gale Crater dried up over time. Similar changes are seen
across the planet, and studying this region up close has been a major long-term
goal for the mission.
“The rocks here will begin to tell us how this once-wet planet changed into
the dry Mars of today, and how long habitable environments persisted even after
that happened,” said Abigail Fraeman, Curiosity’s deputy project scientist, at
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
This video tour
highlights a new panorama from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, captured on July 3,
2021 (the 3,167th Martian day, or sol of the mission). Credits:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Nine Years on Mars
Curiosity landed nine years ago, on Aug. 5, 2012 PDT (Aug. 6, 2012 EDT), to
study whether different Martian environments could have supported microbial
life in the planet’s ancient past, when lakes and groundwater existed within
Gale Crater.
The rover pulverizes rock samples with a drill on its robotic arm, then
sprinkles the powder into the rover’s chassis, where a pair of instruments
determines which chemicals and minerals are present. Curiosity recently drilled
its 32nd rock sample from a target nicknamed “Pontours” that will help detail
the transition from the region of clay minerals to the one dominated by sulfates.
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has used the drill on its robotic arm to take 32 rock samples to date. The Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), a camera on the end of the robotic arm, provided the images in this mosaic. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Because it’s winter at Curiosity’s location, the skies in the new panorama
are relatively dust-free, providing a clear view all the way down to Gale
Crater’s floor. It’s provided an opportunity for the mission team to reflect on
the 16 miles (26 kilometers) Curiosity has driven during the mission.
“Landing day is still one of the happiest days of my professional career,”
said the mission’s new project manager, Megan Richardson Lin of NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Lin started working on Curiosity
just before it launched, joining the surface operations team shortly afterward.
She’s held several roles on the mission since then. “We’re driving a robot as
it explores another planet. Seeing how new discoveries and scientific results
guide each day’s activities is extremely rewarding.”
There’s more to discover on the road ahead. Curiosity has already started
up a path winding between “Rafael Navarro
Mountain,” recently nicknamed to honor a deceased mission
scientist, and a towering butte that’s taller than a four-story building. In
the coming year, the rover will drive past these two features into a narrow
canyon before revisiting the “Greenheugh Pediment,” a slope with a
sandstone cap that the rover briefly summited last year.
More about Curiosity is at: https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/home/ & https://nasa.gov/msl/
Source: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-curiosity-mars-rover-explores-a-changing-landscape
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