Whew — the past year flew by fast! Can you believe it’s almost been a year already since the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity thrilled the world with its nail-biting, sky-craning, engineer-high-fiving landing on Mars on August 6, 2012? Now for something even faster, here you can see what Curiosity has done since landing — where she’s roved, drilled, shook, and captured the views in this sped-up look at her travels, explorations and discoveries.
And since you can never see the landing highlight video too many times, we’ve posted it below:
From 0:55 to 1:11, are we seeing fog coming and going from Mount Sharp as time passes, or is that just the camera adjusting brightness?
I don’t think it is fog. The temperature and pressure on mars is below the triple point of water, so it is probably just light/ atmospheric dust. As far as I know, the only clouds on mars are similar to cirrus clouds here on earth and are composed of frozen carbon dioxide and ice miles above the surface. Here is a cool picture of them though: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap061017.html
Edit: Looks like there is “fog phenomena” on Mars, as observed by the Phoenix lander. Learn something new everyday! http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/04/110404-nasa-mars-fog-water-cycle-phoenix-space-science/
I’d like to see this video embedded or synced with a video from the Mast Cam with the rover stopping and looking closer at talking points – edit in some commentary about drill sites and experiments, display ‘real time’ temperature and or wind direction and speed. Why not embed time synced close up images too? Oh yeah…. then there’s selecting the music… I’ll leave that up to you?