The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) rover Curiosity, which has been exploring Mars for almost 10 years, this time proved to be useful in studying the atmosphere of the Red Planet. Using a navigation camera, he was able to capture the movement of clouds passing over his own location near Mount Sharp in Gale Crater.
Image Source: JPL / NASA
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) noted that it was difficult for Curiosity to achieve a high level of clarity when shooting clouds, since they are quite faint on Mars. In addition, the rover’s cameras are not designed to observe the sky, but are more focused on taking pictures of the surface of the planet and looking for landscape features.
“There are very faint clouds in the Martian atmosphere, so special imaging techniques must be used to observe them. To get a clear, static background, a series of shots is taken. This approach allows everything moving in the pictures, such as clouds or shadows, to become visible following subtracting the static background from each individual image.JPL said in a statement.
In this case, clouds passing over the rover were captured in two eight-frame clips filmed on December 12, 2021 using a navigation camera from two different points. Using different shooting angles will allow you to calculate the speed and height of the clouds, which, in turn, will give an idea of their composition.
“These clouds are very high, almost 80 km above the surface. It is very cold at this altitude, which suggests that the clouds are composed of particles of frozen carbon dioxide, and not water ice, which is usually found in the composition of clouds at a lower altitude. ”— noted in the JPL message.
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