Explore Mars in 360-degrees with this panoramic shot from Curiosity
The Curiosity Rover is celebrating its four-year anniversary on Mars and Nasa has released a 360 panorama shot of the Martian terrain to coincide with the event.
The panorama shows eroded mesas and buttes on Mars, which has led to comparison with similar terrain in the US southwest. The shot is a combination of more than 130 images taken over the course of one day.
The rover captured the image using its Mastcam on August 5, four years since it began its mission on the planet. The vista was taken in the formation known as Murray Buttes on Mount Sharp, a layered mountain with a peak that rises 18,000 feet over the floor of the valley inside the Gale Crater.
The image shows that the buttes and mesas are capped with rock that is relatively resistant to wind erosion, Nasa says. This will help to preserve the remnants of a layer that formerly more fully covered the underlying layer of the terrain that the rover is now driving on.
Over its four years on Mars, Curiosity has returned more than 128,000 images and driven 8.43 miles.
Curiosity is examining the slopes of Mount Sharp in order to learn more about whether or not Mars hosted life, and how and when environmental conditions in the area evolved from hosting freshwater into dry and unliveable conditions.
The site, Murray Buttes, was informally named three years ago in honour of the Caltech planetary scientist Bruce Murray, a former director of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California that manages Curiosity’s mission for Nasa.
In July, Curiosity discovered active sand dunes, the first time they have been found outside of Earth. In an area called the Bagnold Dunes, rippled sand dunes were observed by the rover that researchers believed were being formed by the way Martian wind drags sand particles.
Nasa has also released a game to coincide with Curiosity’s four-year anniversary. Players can drive a rover through the rough Martian terrain and challenge themselves to navigate and balance the rover in order to earn points.
The game also demonstrates how the next Nasa Mars rover, which will be launched in 2020, will use a radar to search for underground water.
– Amelia Heathman, Wired
