- 3251 - CURIOSITY - the rover on Mars? It is hard for me to believe. But we still have robots roaming around the surface of Mars. Images of knobbly rocks and rounded hills are being sent to us by “Curiosity rover” after it climbed Mount Sharp, a 5-mile-tall mountain within the 96-mile-wide basin of Mars' Gale Crater.
------------------ 3251 - CURIOSITY - the rover on Mars?
- The Curiosity rover's Mast Camera, or Mastcam, highlights those features in a panorama captured on July 3, 2021 (the 3,167 Martian day, or sol, of the mission).
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- Spacecraft orbiting Mars show that Curiosity is now somewhere between a region enriched with clay minerals and one dominated by salty minerals called sulfates. The mountain's layers in this area may reveal how the ancient environment within Gale Crater dried up over time. Similar changes are seen across the planet, and studying this region up close has been a major long-term goal for the mission.
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- The rocks in this crater begin to tell us how this once-wet planet changed into the dry Mars of today, and how long habitable environments persisted even after that happened.
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- Curiosity landed nine years ago, on August 5, 2012 PDT , to study whether different Martian environments could have supported microbial life in the planet's ancient past, when lakes and groundwater existed within Gale Crater.
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- The rover pulverizes rock samples with a drill on its robotic arm, then sprinkles the powder into the rover's chassis, where a pair of instruments determines which chemicals and minerals are present.
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- Curiosity recently drilled its 32nd rock sample, as of 2021, from a target nicknamed "Pontours" that will help detail the transition from the region of clay minerals to the one dominated by sulfates.
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- Because it's winter at Curiosity's location, the skies in the new panorama are relatively dust-free, providing a clear view all the way down to Gale Crater's floor. Curiosity has driven 16 miles so far during the mission.
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- Curiosity has already started up a path winding between "Rafael Navarro Mountain," recently nicknamed to honor a deceased mission scientist, and a towering butte that's taller than a four-story building.
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- In the year 2021, the rover will drive past these two features into a narrow canyon before revisiting the "Greenheugh Pediment," a slope with a sandstone cap that the rover briefly summited last year.
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- August 18, 2021 CURIOSITY - the rover on Mars? 3251
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