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NASA regularly releases incredibly stunning GIFs of views outside our own atmosphere, and this week there’s even more beauty from Mars.
On Thursday, the space agency’s Curiosity rover released two moving images showing the six-wheeled vehicle’s view of the Martian landscape over a 12-hour period. It’s essentially a representation of a Martian day, from sunrise to sunset, with Curiosity capturing its own shadow in the foreground.
“Hey, look – I’m a sundial!” tweeted Curiosity’s official account. “Okay, not exactly, but I get soles to enjoy my surroundings. During the solar transit, I used my hazard camera to study the weather and dust on Mars.”
The tweet may have been deleted
You can see the second set of images on NASA’s Mars website.
Curiosity’s photos were taken on November 8th from 5:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. local time. These views look southeast (front camera) and northwest (back camera) from Gediz Vallis Ridge, where Curiosity recently (and gloriously) arrived – a key stop on its steady climb up Mount Sharp in Gale Crater, which has been underway since 2014 is.
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The images were taken using the rover’s front and rear hazard cameras, called hazcams (cameras that not only help the robot detect obstacles and difficult terrain, but have also provided a variety of impressive images of Mars). According to NASA, the rover was instructed to take the image before Mars-solar conjunction, when the sun is roughly between Mars and Earth and breaks communications – a period of about two weeks that occurs every two years.
NASA scientists are hoping to image some Martian clouds or dust swirls, and while they couldn’t get a glimpse of the weather in the photos, the pieces together are a beautiful example of a Martian day – and Curiosity’s presence during that day.
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“As the sky brightens at sunrise, the shadow of the rover’s 7-foot (2-meter) robotic arm moves to the left, and Curiosity’s front wheels emerge from the darkness on either side of the image frame. “Also visible on the left is a round calibration target mounted on the shoulder of the robotic arm,” the NASA blog post says. “Engineers used this target to test the accuracy of the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer, an instrument that detects chemical elements on the surface of Mars.
“At midday, the front Hazcam’s automatic adjustment algorithm sets the exposure time to about a third of a second. As night falls, the exposure time is more than a minute, resulting in sensor glitches commonly known as “hot pixels” that appear as white snow in the final image.”
About spots in front of the camera? Well, you don’t walk around Mars for 11 years without a little dust in your lens.
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