![]() ![]() “Capturing two times of day provides dark shadows because the lighting is coming in from the left and the right, like you might have on a stage - but instead of stage lights, we’re relying on the Sun. “Anyone who’s been to a national park knows the scene looks different in the morning than it does in the afternoon,” said Curiosity engineer Doug Ellison at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement. The image is similar to another postcard taken by Curiosity in November 2021. The blue light signifies the morning, while the yellow light indicates the afternoon. The black-and-white panoramas captured how different the landscape looks at two different times of day, and color was added in post-processing by a team at NASA. One panorama was taken at 9:20 a.m., while the other was taken at 3:40 p.m., both local Mars time. The robotic explorer used its black-and-white navigation cameras to take panoramas of the Marker Band Valley on April 8 before leaving the site. ![]() So while extraterrestrial formations shaped like doorways, huts, and flowers are fun to riff about, we may actually spot our first glimpse of alien life preserved in Martian rocks that may seem utterly humdrum at first glance.The Curiosity rover has captured a stunning new mosaic that reveals the dramatic, colorful hues of morning and afternoon light on the surface of Mars. Scientists think these rocks could potentially contain fossilized microbes that lived on Mars when it was habitable some four billion years ago. NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured this view of layered, flaky rocks believed to have formed in an ancient streambed or small pond. What’s more, NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in 2021, is currently collecting rock cores from an ancient dried-up lakebed that could become the first pristine samples of the red planet ever returned to Earth, if all goes to plan in the coming decade. They may not be quite as scintillating as the objects we may think they resemble-be they flowers, femurs, or floating spoons-but they contain stories about the solar system that date back for billions of years in some cases. In fact, you can bet that just about any weird-looking object spotted by our robot friends on alien worlds is a rock. These are not the markings of some giant Martian cat in search of a scratching post, but rather ancient fault lines.Īnd remember that “mystery hut” spotted by China’s Yutu-2 rover on the far side of the Moon? That turned out to be-drumroll-a rock. Earlier this week, people marveled at new images of claw-like scratches that stretch for hundreds of miles across the western hemisphere of the red planet, which were captured from outer space by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter. The door-like formation is just the latest in a series of weird extraterrestrial features spotted over the decades by interplanetary explorers, robotic and human, that have sparked the imaginations of onlookers. Link Copied NASA provides an update on Perseverance rover's 'firsts' and milestones so far, as well as what's next. The rover has been carefully navigating this area for months in its quest to slowly climb this ancient Martian mountain, though it will likely never reach the summit. NASA releases stunning new images from Mars. The shot of the weird-looking opening was taken on a slope called Greenheugh Pediment, which is riddled with “gator-back” terrain, so named because it resembles reptilian scales. Curiosity is currently ascending Mount Sharp, a mountain that rises to an elevation of 18,000 feet from the floor of Gale Crater, where the rover landed in August 2012. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |