2023-06-14 09:42:05
After completing a major software upgrade in April, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity captured a panoramic ‘postcard’ of the ‘Marker Band Valley’ before leaving it behind.
The ‘postcard’ is an artist’s rendering of the landscape, with color added over two black-and-white panoramas captured by Curiosity’s navigation cameras. The views were taken on April 8 at 9:20 and 15:40. local Mars time, providing dramatically different lighting that, when combined, makes the details in the scene stand out. Blue was added to parts of the postcard captured in the morning and yellow to parts taken in the followingnoon, just like with a similar postcard taken by Curiosity in November 2021.
The resulting image is striking. Curiosity sits on the slopes of Mount Sharp, which sits 5 kilometers high inside Gale Crater, where the rover has been exploring since it landed in 2012. In the distance, beyond its tracks, is Marker Band Valley. , a winding area in the “sulphate region” within which the rover discovered unexpected signs of an ancient lake. Below (in the center and just to the right) are two hills, “Bolívar” and “Deepdale”, which Curiosity drove between while exploring “Paso Paraitepuy”.
“Anyone who’s been to a national park knows that the scene looks different in the morning than it does in the followingnoon,” said Curiosity engineer Doug Ellison of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California, who planned and processed the images. “Shooting two hours of the day gives dark shadows because the lighting comes in from the left and right, like on a stage, but instead of the stage lights, we’re relying on the sun.”
Adding to the depth of the shadows is the fact that it was winter, a period of less dust in the air, at Curiosity’s location when the images were taken. “Shadows on Mars become sharper and deeper when there is little dust and softer when there is a lot of dust,” Ellison added.
The image peers out beyond the rear of the rover, giving a glimpse of its three antennae and nuclear power source. The Radiation Assessment Detector, or RAD instrument, shown as a white circle in the bottom right of the image, has been helping scientists learn how to shield the first astronauts sent to Mars from radiation on the planet’s surface.
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