NASA’s Curiosity Rover captures stunning sunrise and blue afternoon sky simultaneously on Mars

NASA’s Curiosity rover has been exploring the surface of Mars for more than a decade – traversing the unexplored Earth in earnest to collect soil, rock and air samples for researchers on land. Occasionally, he dabbles in another hobby: Mars photography.

A perfect example of this is one of his latest images, which shows a stunning sunrise and a blue afternoon sky simultaneously on Mars. Curiosity took pictures of the Marker Band valley before leaving the region for another part of the Red Planet. The new image is indeed a composite taken on April 8 at 9:20 a.m. and 3:40 p.m. local Martian time, and depicts stunning detail and incredible contrast in lighting between the two periods of the day.

Here’s a morning photo:

Here are the afternoon shots:

Put them together, add a splash of color, and you have the image above!

While the visuals are captivating, the original drawings were black and white – with coloring added later by Earthbound artists. The blue color in the image helps the yellow colors of the sunrise appear on the left side of the image. Meanwhile, two rocky hills—Bolivar and Dipdil—rise dramatically in the center right of the image.

Eagle-eyed viewers can also see the tracks left by rovers the size of SUVs embedded in the Martian soil.

“Twice a day shots give dark shadows because the lighting comes from the left and right, as might happen on a stage, but instead of stage lights, we rely on the sun,” Curiosity engineer Doug Ellison, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. .

In a press release, JPL referred to the photo as “PostcardFrom a 12-year-old Mars rover, who took pictures using his black and white navigation camera after completing a major software update in April. similar pictures From the top of three-mile-high Mount Sharp on Mars in November 2021.

Currently, Curiosity is on a slow and steady journey up the valley toward a cluster of craters above. The journey offers NASA researchers plenty of opportunities to make observations like its newest postcard to expand our images and views of the Martian surface — that is, until we can get there and do it ourselves.

For now, though, we’re in good hands with an interesting curiosity.