#curiosityrover

#curiosityrover

Tour a bit of Mars in this Panoramic Video of NASA's Curiosity Rover Exploring Mount SharpNASA's Curiosity Mars Rover landed on the Red Planet nine years ago and has beamed back a tremendous trove of images and data, to the delight of scientists and space geeks alike.Last week, NASA released a new panoramic video that shows the rover's exploration as it climbs Mount Sharp, a 5-mile-tall (8 km) mountain in the 86-mile wide (154 km) basin of the Martian Gale Crater.Curiosity Mars Rover's current location may hold the key in finding out how the  area around Gale Crater dried up over time. "The rocks here will 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," said Abigail Fraeman of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS#NASA #Mars #CuriosityRover #GaleCrater #JPL #panoramicvideo

NASA’s Curiosity Rover Discovered a Tiny Rock Arch on Mars That Looked Like a CatIn the Gale Crater on Mars, NASA’s Curiosity Rover caught a glimpse and took photos of a strange tiny rock arch. Back on Earth, citizen scientist Kevin Gill managed to stitch the photographs together to create a mosaic perspective in the image seen above.Some people say that the tiny rock arch resembles a cat or an alien’s head, but NASA’s planetary geologist Abigail Fraeman characterized it as “a particularly whimsical image of an interesting rock texture.” She added in the Rover mission update, “I continue to be dazzled by the textures we’re seeing, especially the prevalence of centimeter sized bumps and lumps poking out of the bedrock. … The whole field of view is about 16.5 cm across, so this is a very tiny feature!”The delicate arch is most likely made of an erosion-resistant material, according to planetary geologist Michelle Minitti, as the Gale Crater is dusty and windy. Materials that cannot resist erosion would have been swept away long ago.#NASA #Mars #arch #cat #CuriosityRover #rock #geology #GaleCrater