NASA regularly posts incredibly impressive GIFs of views beyond our own atmosphere, and this week, there’s more beauty from Mars.
On Thursday, the space agency’s rover, Curiosity, posted two moving images showing the six-wheeled vehicle’s view of the Martian landscape over a 12-hour period. It’s essentially a representation of a Martian day, from sunrise to sunset, with Curiosity catching its own shadow in the foreground.
”Hey, look – I’m a sundial!” tweeted Curiosity’s official account. ”Okay, not exactly, but I get soles to enjoy my surroundings. During solar transit, I used my hazard camera to study Martian weather and dust.”
The tweet may have been deleted
You can see the second set of images on NASA’s Mars website.
Curiosity’s photos were taken on November 8 from 5:30 am to 5:30 pm local time. These views look southeast (front camera) and northwest (rear camera) from Gediz Vallis Ridge, where Curiosity recently (and gloriously) arrived – a major stop on its steady climb up Mount Sharp in Gale Crater, which has been underway since 2014.
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The images were taken using the rover’s front and rear Hazard Avoidance Cameras, known as hazcams (cameras that not only help the robot identify obstacles and difficult terrain but have also provided a variety of impressive images of Mars). According to NASA, the rover was instructed to record it before the Martian solar conjunction, when the Sun is roughly between Mars and Earth and disrupts communications – this is a period of about two weeks that occurs once every two years.
NASA scientists hope to image some Martian clouds or dust swirls, and although they didn’t get a glimpse of the weather in the photos, the pieces put together are a beautiful example of a Martian day – and Curiosity’s presence during it.
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”As the sky brightens at sunrise, the shadow of the rover’s 7-foot (2-meter) robotic arm moves to the left, and Curiosity’s front wheels emerge from the darkness on either side of the image frame. Also visible on the left is a round calibration target mounted on the shoulder of the robotic arm,” the NASA blog post said. “Engineers used this target to test the accuracy of the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer, an instrument that detects chemical elements on the surface of Mars.
”At midday, the front Hazcam’s auto-adjust algorithm sets the exposure time at around one-third of a second. When night falls, that exposure time becomes over a minute, causing sensor interference commonly known as “hot pixels” that appear as white snow across the final image.”
About spots on camera? Well, you don’t walk around Mars for 11 years without a little dust in the lens.
2023-12-29 12:40:42
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