NASA's Curiosity robot captures a panoramic view of the dusty Martian sky

WASHINGTON: NASA's Curiosity rover has broadcast a 360-degree panoramic view of the Martian landscape, revealing a reddish-brown sky clouded by a global dust storm that has covered the Red Planet for weeks.

The panorama, captured at Curiosity's current location on Vera Rubin Ridge, also includes a rare view of the mobile's Mast camera itself, revealing a thin layer of dust on its deck.

On August 9, the rover inspected the area after collecting a new sample of rock. His last two drill attempts have been thwarted by rocks of unexpected hardness, NASA said in a statement.

Curiosity began using a new drilling method earlier this year to work around a mechanical problem.

The tests showed that it was as effective at drilling rocks as the old method, suggesting that hard rocks would have been a problem, regardless of the method used.

There is no way for Curiosity to accurately determine the hardness of a rock before drilling it, so for this most recent drilling activity, the rover team made an educated guess.

It was thought that a large ridge on the ridge included harder rocks, able to stand despite wind erosion; a place under the ledge was more likely to have softer erodible rocks.

This strategy seems to have materialized, but many questions remain about Vera Rubin Ridge's raison d'être.

The rover has never come across a place as diverse in color and texture, according to Ashwin Vasavada, scientist of the Curiosity project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the United States.

"The ridge is not that monolithic thing – it has two distinct sections, each with a variety of colors," Vasavada said.

"Some are visible to the naked eye and even more so when we look in the near infrared, just beyond what our eyes can see, some seem to be related to the hardness of the rocks," he said. .

The best way to find out why these rocks are so difficult is to powder them for the robot's two internal labs.

Analyzing them could reveal what serves as "cement" in the ridge, allowing it to resist despite wind erosion.

According to Mr. Vasavada, the groundwater crossing the ridge in the past probably played a role in its strengthening, perhaps acting as a plumbing to distribute this "cement" anti-wind.

Two more drilled samples are planned for the ridge in September. After that, Curiosity will visit its scientific end zone: areas enriched with clay minerals and sulphated higher on Mount Sharp.