NASA’s Curiosity rover sends an image postcard from Mars

An creative interpretation of Curiosity’s view excessive up on a Martian mountain was created by mission workforce members who have been shocked by the sweeping panorama.

NASA’s Curiosity rover captured a exceptional picture from its most up-to-date perch on the facet of Mars’ Mount Sharp. The mission workforce was so impressed by the fantastic thing about the panorama, they mixed two variations of the black-and-white pictures from completely different instances of the day and added colours to create a uncommon postcard from the Red Planet.

Curiosity captures a 360-degree view of its environment with its black-and-white navigation cameras every time it completes a drive. To make the ensuing panorama simpler to ship to Earth, the rover retains it in a compressed, low-quality format. But when the rover workforce noticed the view from Curiosity’s most up-to-date stopping level, the scene was simply too fairly to not seize it within the highest high quality that the navigation cameras are able to.

Many of the rover’s most beautiful panoramas are from the colour Mastcam instrument, which has far increased decision than the navigation cameras. That’s why the workforce added colours of their very own to this newest picture. The blue, orange, and inexperienced tints usually are not what the human eye would see; as a substitute, they signify the scene as seen at completely different instances of day.

On Nov. 16, 2021 (the three,299th Martian day, or sol, of the mission), engineers commanded Curiosity to take two units of mosaics, or composite pictures, capturing the scene at 8:30 a.m. and once more at 4:10 p.m. native Mars time. The two instances of day offered contrasting lighting situations that introduced out quite a lot of panorama particulars. The workforce then mixed the 2 scenes in a creative re-creation that features components from the morning scene in blue, the afternoon scene in orange, and a mixture of each in inexperienced.

At the middle of the picture is the view again down Mount Sharp, the 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain that Curiosity has been driving up since 2014. Rounded hills may be seen within the distance at center-right; Curiosity acquired a more in-depth view of those again in July, when the rover began to see intriguing adjustments within the panorama. A subject of sand ripples referred to as the “Sands of Forvie” stretches a quarter- to a half-mile (400 to 800 meters) away.

At the far proper of the panorama is the craggy “Rafael Navarro Mountain,” named after a Curiosity workforce scientist who handed away earlier this yr. Poking up behind it’s the higher a part of Mount Sharp, far above the world Curiosity is exploring. Mount Sharp lies inside Gale Crater, a 96-mile-wide (154-kilometer-wide) basin fashioned by an historical affect; Gale Crater’s distant rim stands 7,500 toes tall (2.3 kilometers), and is seen on the horizon about 18 to 25 miles away (30 to 40 kilometers).

The Curiosity mission is led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California.