Sulfates form in drier conditions, so NASA researchers suspect that this area on Mount Sharp may explain how Mars’ climate changed over time, reports. “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,” says Abigail Fraeman, Curiosity’s deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, in a statement. In 2014, Curiosity reached the base of Mount Sharp and, since then, has been climbing the five-mile-tall mountain and exploring its rounded hills for clues as to how the lake system dried up, reports. The rover has observed sediment patterns that suggest the Gale Crater housed a lake and stream system billions of years ago. Since landing on the Red Planet in August 2012, Curiosity has explored the Gale Crater for nine years to see if Mars had the right conditions to support microbial life at some point in its history. NASA also color-balanced the photos to display how Mars would look if it had similar light conditions to those on Earth. NASA stitched together 129 individual images taken with the rover’s Mast Camera to create 360-degree panoramic vistas that showcase Mars’ landscape history, per Gizmodo’s Alyse Stanley. The varying layers on Mount Sharp, located in the Gale Crater, may help researchers uncover how Mars became the arid environment it is today, reports Mike Wall for. The images, later assembled into a tour-like video, reveal that Curiosity had cruised into a region consisting of salty sulfates that transition into another area enriched with clay minerals. Curiosity and its navigation cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.On July 3, 2021, NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover captured astonishing panoramic photos of the Red Planet’s unique landscape on Mount Sharp. Mars Science Laboratory is a project of NASA's Science Mission Directorate.
Mount Sharp lies inside Gale Crater, a 96-mile-wide (154-kilometer-wide) basin formed by an ancient impact Gale Crater's distant rim stands 7,500 feet tall (2.3 kilometers), and is visible on the horizon about 18 to 25 miles away (30 to 40 kilometers). Poking up behind it is the upper part of Mount Sharp, far above the area Curiosity is exploring. A field of sand ripples known as the "Sands of Forvie" stretches a quarter- to a half-mile (400 to 800 meters) away.Īt the far right of the panorama is the craggy " Rafael Navarro Mountain," named after a Curiosity team scientist who passed away earlier this year. Rounded hills can be seen in the distance at center-right Curiosity got a closer view of these back in July, when the rover started to see intriguing changes in the landscape. Figure 2 is the mosaic taken in the morning.Īt the center of the image is the view back down Mount Sharp, the 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain that Curiosity has been driving up since 2014. Figure 1 is the mosaic taken in the afternoon. The main image is an artistic interpretation of the scene. They combined the two scenes in an artistic re-creation that includes images from the morning scene in blue, the afternoon scene in orange, and a combination of both in green. The two times of day provided contrasting lighting conditions that brought out a variety of unique landscape details. 16, 2021 (the 3,299th Martian day, or sol, of the mission), engineers commanded Curiosity to take two sets of mosaics, or composite images, capturing the scene at 8:30 a.m. Blue, orange, and green color was added to a combination of both panoramas for an artistic interpretation of the scene.
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover used its black-and-white navigation cameras to capture panoramas of this scene at two times of day.
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