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A camera on NASA's Orbiter Mars Reconnaissance spotted the Curiosity rover on May 31, 2019.
(Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech)
You can not go anywhere these days without a satellite monitoring your activities, and yes, that includes Mars.
A spacecraft in orbit around the red planet has glimpsed the long term NASA Rover Curiosity climb the mountain Aeolis Mons (known as Mount Sharp) at a place nicknamed "Woodland Bay".
The newly released NASA Mars Recognition Orbiter This image shows a bright spot that is probably the "head" of the rover (or remote sensing mast), NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said in a statement. "At the time of acquiring this image, the rover was facing north at 65 degrees in a counter-clockwise direction, which would have allowed the mast to be placed at about the right place to produce that luminous dot," added JPL.
Related: Bam! Fresh crater spied on Mars – and it looks spectacular
Dramatic and dramatic terrain surrounds NASA's two-ton rover as it climbs the three-mile (5 km) mountain located inside the Gale crater, the rover's landing region . Mount Sharp layers of sports rocks that provide information on the history of the region, including its water. The curiosity is now close to a clay unit that is probably formed in the water.
Curiosity could be spotted through brilliant thinking, which is clear from the MRO's HiRISE camera. The camera from the University of Arizona is so sensitive that it can capture the dust of the devil's shadows and small dunes on the Martian surface. Famous, HiRISE also an image of the Curiosity parachute as the rover descended to the surface in August 2012.
"Mirror-type reflections on smooth surfaces appear as particularly bright spots in HiRISE images," said JPL. "For the camera to see these reflections on the rover, the sun and the MRO must be in exactly the right place.This Curiosity enhanced color image shows three or four distinct bright spots that are likely to reflect such reflections."
Unless there is a technical problem, the MRO will probably continue to work after the successor to Curiosity, a mission called March 2020, land in the crater of Jezero on February 18, 2021 – so we can also get HiRISE pictures of this vehicle. March 2020 will look for signs of old habitability, building on Curiosity's current quest to better understand potentially habitable environments. The rover will also deploy a helicopter test, which will be the first vehicle of its kind on Mars.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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