[ad_1]
NASA’s shiny new Perseverance rover has been stealing the show lately, but Curiosity is still on Mars too. This aging robot is still young and hip enough to take a selfie – hell, Curiosity pioneered the selfie rover. The last shot shows the rover posing in front of a large rock outcrop that the team nicknamed “Mont Mercou” after a French mountain.
Mont Mercou is far from a mountain, but the Curiosity team felt it was geologically interesting enough to get a name. It is around six meters tall and is fully visible behind the rover. That’s not all you can see in this photo – there’s a small borehole right in front of Curiosity. NASA nicknamed this site “Nontron” after a village located near the real Mont Mercou in France. The team chose the French nicknames for this region because the Mars orbiters previously detected a clay mineral called nontronite, which is found in large quantities in the Nontron region.
The Nontron sample was loaded into the rover’s scientific instruments, making it the 30th sample analyzed by the rover during its more than 3,000 sols (over eight Earth years) on the Red Planet. This is something Perseverance will do a lot as it travels the Red Planet and stores samples for a later mission back to Earth.
Curiosity produced this selfie with a surprisingly high number of images taken on two different days. The background consists of 11 images taken with the Mastcam on the 3060 floor, which you probably know as the “head” of the rover. The selfie portion of the image is from 60 individual images captured with the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on Floor 3070. This camera sits on the robotic arm, which allows it to move around and capture images under different angles. When processing the frames into a single huge photo, NASA may cut off the arm to make the image look like it was taken by someone standing next to the robot. There is no one on Mars to take such photos, as far as we know.
NASA also used the Mastcam to capture 32 images of Mont Mercou. The team turned this into a stereoscopic view – you can use the anaglyph above to see the outcrop in 3D, with proper glasses.
Curiosity always sets records on Mars and shows no signs of stopping. The rover has been climbing Mount Sharp since 2014, examining the stratification of the planet as it goes. Currently, Curiosity is located in an area that changes from clay geology to the sulphated unit. The mission has been extended indefinitely, so Curiosity will continue to climb for as long as possible.
Now read:
[ad_2]
Source link