Go on a panoramic video tour of Mars with the Curiosity Rover

Just because you can’t catch one shuttle to mars That doesn’t mean you still can’t visit the Red Planet. This week, NASA released a video featuring a panoramic tour of the planet’s surface using images captured by its Curiosity rover, which this month celebrates its ninth year on Mars.

The rover captured the 360-degree view on July 3 near “Rafael Navarro Mountain,” a hill that NASA nicknamed after an astrobiologist who worked on the mission and died in January. The panorama is made up of 129 individual images stitched together, and its colors have been balanced to white to replicate how Mars would appear in the type of daylight we’re used to here on Earth, NASA said in A press release. You can check out the video tour below:

The rover has been roaming Gale Crater, a 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers wide) basin on Mars, since it first landed there in 2012. At this time of year, the planet’s winter, the haze The characteristic red dust around Mars thinned out a bit, giving Curiosity a clear view of the crater floor and the 16 miles (25.7 kilometers) it traveled during its mission.

These snapshots also provide interesting information about how the planet’s environment has changed over millions of years. The area Curiosity had previously explored was dominated by clay-rich rocks that formed in lakes, but it now finds rocks filled with salty minerals called sulfates.

“The rocks here will begin to tell us how this once humid planet turned into today’s dry Mars and how long habitable environments have persisted even after that,” said Abigail Fraeman, assistant scientist for the Curiosity Project at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

It is in this ancient Martian environment that scientists believe that life may have existed on the planet, which is why Curiosity and NASA’s other Martian rover, Perseverance, scan the area for clues. Over the next year, NASA said Curiosity will venture beyond Rafael Navarro Mountain and another mountain taller than a four-story building. After that, he will enter a narrow canyon before revisiting a slope with a sandstone cap nicknamed “Fronton Greenheugh”Which he had already achieved in 2020.