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Third Day on Mars
In this image released by NASA on Wednesday, Aug. 8, 2012, a
self portrait of NASA’s Curiosity rover was taken by its Navigation cameras,
located on the now-upright mast. The camera snapped pictures 360-degrees around
the rover. (AP Photo/NASA)
NASA's Curiosity rover took this self-portrait using a
camera on its newly deployed mast.
PASADENA, California—The science rover Curiosity took a
break from instrument checks on its third full day on Mars to beam back more
pictures from the Red Planet, including its first self-portrait and a
360-degree color view of its home in Gale Crater.
The panoramic mosaic, comprising 130 separate images that
Curiosity captured with its newly activated navigation cameras, shows a
rust-colored, pebble-strewn expanse stretching to a wall of the crater’s rim in
one direction and a tall mound of layered rock in another, the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) said on Thursday.
That formation, named Mt. Sharp, stands at the center of the
vast, ancient impact crater and several miles from where Curiosity touched down
at the end of an eight-month voyage across 566 million kilometers of space.
A partial view of a 360-degree color panorama of the
Curiosity rover's landing site on Gale Crater. The panorama comes from
low-resolution versions of images taken Thursday, August 9, with a
34-millimeter mast camera. Cameras mounted on Curiosity's remote sensing mast
have beamed back fresh images of the site.
Mars’ geologic history
The layers of exposed rock are thought to hold a wealth of
Mars’ geologic history, making it the main target of exploration for scientists
who will use the rover to seek evidence of whether the planet most similar to
Earth might now harbor or once may have hosted key ingredients for microbial
life.
But mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
near Los Angeles are exercising caution immediately following Curiosity’s jarring,
death-defying descent to the surface on Sunday night.
They plan to spend weeks putting the nuclear-powered,
six-wheeled rover and its sophisticated array of instruments through a
painstaking series of “health” checks before embarking on the thrust of their
science mission in earnest.
The Curiosity rover at its landing site inside Gale Crater.
The image was taken from the rover's navigation cameras.
The $2.5-billion Curiosity project, formally named the Mars
Science Laboratory, is Nasa’s first astrobiology mission since the Viking
probes of the 1970s and is touted as the first fully equipped mobile
geochemistry lab ever sent to a distant world.
After three full days on the Red Planet, “Curiosity
continues to behave flawlessly” and has “executed all planned activities”
without a hitch, mission manager Michael Watkins said.
A
panoramic photograph shows the Curiosity rover's surroundings at its landing
site inside Gale Crater. The rim of Gale Crater can be seen to the left, and
the base of Mount Sharp is to the center-right.
Equipment checks
The latest round of equipment checks included an instrument
designed to determine mineral composition of powdered rock and soil samples;
one to analyze soil and atmospheric samples for organic compounds; one to
detect traces of water locked in shallow mineral deposits; and another that
uses particle X-rays to identify chemical elements in rocks and soils.
A color image from NASA's Curiosity rover shows the
pebble-covered surface of Mars. This panorama mosaic was made of 130 images of
144 by 144 pixels each. Selected full frames from this panorama, which are
1,200 by 1,200 pixels each, are expected to be transmitted to Earth later.
Like Mojave Desert
The very delivery of Curiosity to the surface of Mars
already has been hailed by Nasa as the greatest feat of robotic space flight.
The car-sized rover, which flew from Earth encased in a
protective capsule, blasted into the Martian sky at hypersonic speed and landed
safely seven minutes later after an elaborate, daredevil descent combining a
giant parachute with a rocket-pack that lowered the rover to the Martian
surface on a tether.
Since then, the rover has been sending a string of early
images back to Earth, relayed by two Nasa satellites orbiting Mars, providing
glimpses of a terrain that scientists say appear reminiscent of the Mojave
Desert in Southern California.
Two blast marks from the descent stage's rockets can be seen
in the center of this image. Also seen is Curiosity's left side. This picture
is a mosaic of images taken by the rover's navigation cameras.
Dark pebbles
One shot beamed back Wednesday night, the first taken by
Curiosity of itself, shows the rover’s top deck strewn with dark pebbles
apparently kicked up from the ground when the craft landed. Nasa scientists
said the gravel does not appear to pose any risk to instruments on the vehicle.
Two separate high-resolution “Navcam” images taken of the
surface show that thrust from the sky-crane rockets during descent carved out a
0.5-meter trench in the surface, exposing what appears to be Martian bedrock
underneath.
When Curiosity wakes up for its fourth day on Mars early
Friday (California time), mission controllers plan to conduct additional
instrument checks and prepare the craft for an upgrade of its main computer software
for surface operations.
All other activities will be suspended during that upgrade,
which will begin on day 5 of the mission and last four days.
In this portion of the larger mosaic from the previous
frame, the crater wall can be seen north of the landing site, or behind the
rover. NASA says water erosion is believed to have created a network of
valleys, which enter Gale Crater from the outside here.
Future missions
“It’s very exciting to think about getting there, but it is
quite a ways away,” said mission scientist Dawn Sumner.
During its two-year mission, the roaming laboratory will
analyze rocks and soil in search of the chemical building blocks of life, and
determine whether there were habitable conditions where microbes could thrive.
As high-tech as Curiosity is, it can’t directly look for
past or present life; future missions would be needed to answer that question.
Curiosity is the most complex interplanetary rover ever
designed, and engineers are taking their time performing health checkups. The
rover will not make its first drive or move its robotic arm for weeks.
In this portion of the larger mosaic from the previous
frame, the crater wall can be seen north of the landing site, or behind the
rover. NASA says water erosion is believed to have created a network of
valleys, which enter Gale Crater from the outside here.
Mars rover Curiosity beamed back a sweeping color panorama
of the planet's surface Thursday, showing the rocky, reddish desert surrounding
it and the mountain it will explore in the coming months.
The 360-degree view captures the landscape of Gale Crater,
where Curiosity touched down early Monday, and the foot of Mount Sharp -- the
rover's primary scientific target. Mike Malin, whose company built the camera
used to shoot the scene, said the shot was "probably not the best
pointed," but added, "We hope we'll get many others."
This partial mosaic from the Curiosity rover shows Mars'
environment around the rover's landing site on Gale Crater. NASA says the
pictured landscape resembles portions of the U.S. Southwest. The
high-resolution mosaic includes 130 images, but not all the images have been
returned by the rover to Earth. The blackened areas of the mosaic are the parts
that haven't been transmitted yet.
The brightness of the image was boosted to compensate for
the dim sunlight of the martian afternoon, but the colors were untouched, NASA
said
Curiosity went through its paces "flawlessly" on
its third full day on the planet, mission manager Michael Watkins said
Thursday. The rover's mission is to determine whether Mars ever had an
environment capable of supporting life, and its prime target is Mount Sharp,
the 18,000-foot (5,500-meter) peak about 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) to the
south.
This image, taken from the rover's mast camera, looks south
of the landing site toward Mount Sharp.
Curiosity opening Martian frontier?
Scientists hope the layers of rock that form the mountain
will give them a timeline of the history of Mars. Curiosity mission planner
Dawn Sumner said photographs like the ones beamed back by the rover, as well as
others taken by probes in orbit, will be used to map a path to the mountain's
base -- "doing the best science we can along the way, but also keeping our
eyes on that beautiful layered rock," she said.
The rover is supposed to run for two years, but a previous
rover, Opportunity, has been working on Mars since 2004 -- well beyond the
three months NASA planned. Opportunity's sister rover, Spirit, ran from 2004 to
2010.
This image, with a portion of the rover in the corner, shows
the wall of Gale Crater running across the horizon at the top of the image. The
Mars rover Curiosity arrived on Mars early on August 6 and began beaming back
images from the surface. See all the images as they are released here.
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