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Don’t forget NASA Curiosity of the rover on Mars just because her younger cousin is about to land on the red planet.
The car-sized Curiosity marked 3,000 days on Mars, or soils, on the Red Planet on Tuesday (January 12), just five weeks before NASA. Perseverance rover is scheduled to land. (A soil is slightly longer than an earth day, lasts about 24 hours and 40 minutes.)
To celebrate this milestone, the Curiosity team released a stunning panorama that the rover captured on November 18, 2020. The photo, which consists of 122 images stitched together, shows an intriguing series of rock “benches” on the slopes of the Mount Sharp, which Curiosity has been climbing since September 2014.
Related: Amazing photos of Mars by NASA’s Curiosity rover (latest images)
“Our science team is excited to find out how they formed and what they mean for Gale’s ancient environment,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Project Curiosity scientist, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a press release.
“Gale” is Gale Crater, the 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) hole in the ground that Curiosity has been exploring since it landed on August 5, 2012. Observations from the rover showed the crater was home to a potentially habitable lake. et-stream in the ancient past, a system that probably persisted for millions of years.
Mount Sharp rises approximately 5.5 km into the Martian sky from central Gale. Curiosity has been weaving its way through the foothills of the massif for more than six years now, seeking clues to the Red Planet’s long transition from a relatively hot and humid world to the cold desert it is today.
Perseverance is scheduled to land on February 18 inside Jezero Crater, about 3,700 km from Gale. Perseverance is similar to Curiosity in many ways, sharing its basic body plan and dramatic ‘sky crane’ landing strategy. The new rover will do a different job, however, looking for signs of older Life on Mars in the 28-mile-wide (45 km) Jezero, which was home to a lake and river delta in the ancient past, and collecting samples for future return to Earth, among other tasks.
But Perseverance, the centerpiece of NASA’s $ 2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, is still on its way to the Red Planet. So take a few minutes to appreciate the work Curiosity continues to do on the slopes of a mountain far, far from home.
“3000 Soils have been thrilling so far, and I can’t wait to see what else we discover as Curiosity continues to climb Mount Sharp,” Lauren Edgar, Mission Team Member, Planetary Geologist at the US Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Science Center. Flagstaff, Arizona, written in a blog post Tuesday. “Tonight, I’ll raise a drink to Curiosity and the science and engineering teams that have brought us here!”
Mike Wall is the author of “Over there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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