Don’t forget about NASA The rover Curiosity just because his younger cousin is about to land on the Red Planet.
Curiosity about the size of the car marked 3,000 Martian days or solos on Tuesday on the Red Planet (January 12), just five weeks before NASA Persistence of a rover is planned to touch. (The ash is slightly longer than Earth’s day and lasts about 24 hours and 40 minutes.)
To celebrate the cornerstone, the Curiosity team released a magnificent panorama, which the rover took on November 18, 2020. The photo, which consists of 122 joined images, shows an intriguing series of rock “benches”
Connected: Amazing photos of Mars from NASA’s Curiosity rover (latest images)
“Our research team is excited to find out how they formed and what they mean for the ancient environment in Gale,” Curiosity Project scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Southern California Jet Propulsion Laboratory said. said in a statement.
Gale is the Gale Crater, a 96-mile (154-kilometer) wide hole in the ground that Curiosity has been exploring since it landed on August 5, 2012. The rover’s observations show that the crater hosted a potentially habitable lake – and a flow system. in the ancient past, such that it probably lasted millions of years.
Mount Sharpe rises about 3.4 miles (5.5 km) in the Martian sky from the center of Gale. Curiosity has been making its way through the foothills for more than six years, looking for clues to the Red Planet’s long transition from a relatively warm and humid world to the cold desert it is today.
Permanence is scheduled to land on February 18 in Jezero Crater, which is about 2,300 miles (3,700 km) from Gale. Persistence is similar to Curiosity in many ways, sharing its basic body plan and dramatic landing strategy with a celestial crane. The new rover will do a different job, however, looking for signs from antiquity Martian life within a 28-mile-wide (45 km) Jezero, which housed the lake and river delta in the ancient past and collected samples for future returns to Earth, among other tasks.
But Permanence, the central part of NASA’s $ 2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, is still on its way to the Red Planet. So take a few minutes to appreciate the work Curiosity continues to do on the mountain slopes far, far away from home.
“An exciting 3,000 solos have been made so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else we find as Curiosity continues to climb Mount Sharpe,” said Lauren Edgar, a member of the mission team, a planetary geologist at the American Geological Survey’s Astrogeological Science Center. Flagstaff, Arizona, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. “Tonight I will raise a glass for Curiosity and the scientific and engineering teams that have come this far!”
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Carl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow it on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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