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Take a deep breath because this new panorama from Mars enthusiast Stu Atkinson will take it away.
“Anyway, a whole bunch of these came down, like I said, and to my delight they all linked up to form a big, biiiiiiiig panoramic mosaic,” said Stu on his blog “The Gale Gazette.” “And here it is. Obviously you’ll need to click on it to enlarge it… and I’ll warn you, it’s a big image, you can kiss the next few minutes goodbye because you’ll be panning around it for a while…”
Zoom in and you can see actual rocks. Click that little button at the right of the toolbar and Mars will take over your screen.
So far, Curiosity has rolled across a barely dusty plain in Gale Crater. Here’s a look of things to come. In black-and-white image from Curiosity, there appear to be big dunes to cross to get to the foothills of Aeolis Mons, or Mount Sharp.
A black-and-white but still breathtaking view of the dusty terrain between Curiosity’s current location and the foothills of Aeolis Mons, or Mount Sharp. Credit: NASA/JPL/Stu Atkinson
Curiosity has nearly finished robotic arm tests. Once complete, the rover will be able to touch and examine its first Mars rock.
“We’re about to drive some more and try to find the right rock to begin doing contact science with the arm,” said Jennifer Trosper, Curiosity mission manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif, in a press release.
This image from NASA’s Curiosity rover shows the open inlet where powered rock and soil samples will be funneled down for analysis. It was taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on Curiosity’s 36th Martian day, or sol, of operations on Mars (Sept. 11, 2012). MAHLI was about 8 inches (20 centimeters) away from the mouth of the Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument when it took the picture. The entrance of the funnel is about 1.4 inches (3.5 centimeters) in diameter. The mesh screen is about 2.3 inches (5.9 centimeters) deep. The mesh size is 0.04 inches (1 millimeter). Once the samples have gone down the funnel, CheMin will be shooting X-rays at the samples to identify and quantify the minerals.
Engineers and scientists use images like these to check out Curiosity’s instruments. This image is a composite of eight MAHLI pictures acquired at different focus positions and merged onboard the instrument before transmission to Earth; this is the first time the MAHLI performed this technique since arriving at Curiosity’s field site inside Gale Crater. The image also shows angular and rounded pebbles and sand that were deposited on the rover deck during landing on Aug. 5, 2012 PDT (Aug. 6, 2012 EDT).
Two science instruments, a camera called Mars Hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI, that can take close-up color images and a tool called Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) that can determine the elemental composition of a rock, also have passed tests. The instruments are mounted on a turret at the end of the robotic arm and can be placed in contact with target rocks. The adjustable focus MAHLI camera produced images this week of objects near and far; of the underbelly of Curiosity, across inlet ports and a penny that serves as a calibration target on the rover.
This close-up image shows tiny grains of Martian sand that settled on the penny that serves as a calibration target on NASA’s Curiosity rover. The larger grain under Abraham Lincoln’s ear is about 0.2 millimeters across. The grains are classified as fine to very fine sand.
The Mars Hand Lens Imagery (MAHLI) on the Curiosity rover taken by the Mast Camera on the 32nd Martian day, or sol, of operations on the surface. Engineers imaged MAHLI to inspect the dust cover and to ensure that the tool’s LED lights are functional. Scientists enhanced the image to show the scene as it would appear under Earth’s lighting conditions. This helps in analyzing the background terrain.
HiRISE image of branching features in the floor of Antoniadi Crater thought to contain clay material. (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)
In the hunt for evidence of a warmer, wetter past on Mars, clay deposits have been viewed as good indications that stable liquid water existed on its surface for some time — perhaps even long enough to allow life to develop. But new research conducted here on Earth shows that some clays don’t necessarily need lakes of liquid water to form. Instead they can be the result of volcanic activity, which is not nearly so hospitable to life.
A research team led by Alain Meunier of the Université de Poitiers in France studied lavas containing iron and magnesium — similar to ancient clays identified on the surface of Mars — in the French Polynesian atoll of Moruroa. The team’s findings show that the same types of clay outcrops can be caused by the solidifying of water-rich magma in a volcanic environment, and don’t require Earthlike aquatic conditions at all.
The results also correlate to the deuterium-to-hydrogen (D/H) ratio within clays found in Martian meteorites.
“To crystallize, clays need water but not necessarily liquid water,” said Alain Meunier to the Agençe France-Presse (AFP). “Consequently, they cannot be used to prove that the planet was habitable or not during its early history.”
Additionally, the clay deposits found on Mars can be several hundred meters thick, which seems to be more indicative of upwelling magma than interactions with water.
“[This] new hypothesis proposes that the minerals instead formed during brief periods of magmatic degassing, diminishing the prospects for signs of life in these settings,” wrote Brian Hynek from the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado, in response to the paper by Meunier et al. which was published in the September 9 edition of the journal Nature Geoscience.
This does not necessarily mean that all Martian clays weren’t formed in the presence of water, however. Gale Crater — where NASA’s Curiosity rover is now exploring — could very well have been the site of a Martian lake, billions of years in the past. Clays found there could have been created by water.
According to Bethany Ehlmann of the California Institute of Technology, co-author of the study, “there are particular characteristics of texture” to clays formed under different conditions, and “Gale is a different flavor of Mars.”
Perhaps Curiosity will yet discover if Gale’s original flavor was more cool and wet than hot and spicy.
Image Cation: Curiosity takes Self Portrait on Sol 32 with the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI). Image has been rotated up and enhanced by JPL. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems
Curiosity has snapped an evocative new color self-portrait – and it’s totally unique, being the 1st head shot pose, showing the top of the Remote Sensing Mast (RSM).
You’ll notice it’s a bit dusty ! That’s because it was acquired through the transparent dust cover protecting the high resolution Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera positioned on the turret at the end of Curiosity’s 7 foot (2.1 meter) long robotic arm.
The gorgeous new image was taken on Sol 32 (Sept. 7, 2012) with the dust cover closed over the camera lens and thus provides a taste of even more spectacular views yet to come. The picture beautifully shows the Mastcam, Chemcam and Navcam cameras with the rim of Gale Crater in the background.
The MAHLI image above has been enhanced and rotated – to right side up. See the MAHLI raw image below.
The image was taken as JPL engineers were inspecting and moving the arm turret holding MAHLI and the other science instruments and tools and looking back to image them in turn using the Mast’s cameras.
NASA’s mega Martian rover is pausing for about a week or two at this location reached after driving on Sol 29 (Sept. 2) and will thoroughly check out the robotic arm and several science instruments.
So far Curiosity has driven about 358 feet (109 meters) and is sitting roughly 270 feet from the “Bradbury Landing” touchdown spot as the Martian crow flies.
The car sized robot is about a quarter of the way to Glenelg, the destination of her first lengthy science stop where three different types of geologic terrain intersect and are easily accessible for a detailed science survey using all 10 state of the art instruments including the rock drill and soil sampling mechanisms.
Image Caption:3-D View from Bradbury Landing- from Navcam cameras.. See the full panorama below. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Now you can enjoy the thrills of Curiosity’s touchdown site at Bradbury Landing as if you there – chronicled in stunning 3 D !! Check out this glorious 360-degree stereo panorama just released by JPL.
The pano was assembled by JPL from individual right and left eye images snapped by the rover’s mast mounted navigation cameras on sols 2 and 12 of the mission – Aug. 8 and 18, 2012.
So whip out your handy-dandy, red-blue (cyan) anaglyph glasses and start exploring the magnificent home of NASA’s newest Mars rover inside Gale Crater.
Image Caption: Complete 360 degree Panoramic 3-D View from Bradbury Landing by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The mosaic shows Curiosity’s eventual mountain destination – Mount Sharp – to its visible peak at the right, as well as the eroded rim of Gale Crater and a rover partial self portrait. Curiosity cannot see the actual summit from the floor of Gale Crater at Bradbury landing.
In about a year, the 1 ton behemoth will begin climbing up the side of Mount Sharp – a layered mountain some 3.4 miles (5.5 kilometers) high that contains deposits of hydrated minerals.
Curiosity will investigate and sample soils and rocks with her powerful suite of 10 state of the art science instruments.
See below JPL’s individual right and left eye pano’s from which the 3-D mosaic was created.
Image Caption: Complete 360 degree Panoramic left eye View from Bradbury Landing by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover – from Navcam cameras. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Image Caption: Complete 360 degree Panoramic right eye View from Bradbury Landing by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover- from Navcam cameras. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The rover has now departed Bradbury landing and begun her long Martian Trek on an easterly path to Glenelg – her first stop designated for a lengthy science investigation.
Glenelg lies at the intersection of three distinct types of geologic terrain.
So far Curiosity has driven 358 feet (109 meters) and is in excellent health.
Before-and-after images from Curiosity’s ChemCam micro-imager show holes left by its million-watt laser (NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/IRAP/LPGN/CNRS)
PEWPEWPEWPEWPEW! Curiosity’s head-mounted ChemCam did a little target practice on August 25, blasting millimeter-sized holes in a soil sample named “Beechey” in order to acquire spectrographic data from the resulting plasma glow. The neat line of holes is called a five-by-one raster, and was made from a distance of about 11.5 feet (3.5 meters).
Sorry Obi-Wan, but Curiosity’s blaster is neither clumsy nor random!
Mounted to Curiosity’s “head”, just above its Mastcam camera “eyes”, ChemCam combines a powerful laser with a telescope and spectrometer that can analyze the light emitted by zapped materials, thereby determining with unprecedented precision what Mars is really made of.
For five billionths of a second the laser focuses a million watts of energy onto a specific point. Each of the 5 holes seen on Beechey are the result of 50 laser hits. 2 to 4 millimeters in diameter, the holes are much larger than the laser point itself, which is only .43 millimeters wide at that distance.
ChemCam’s laser allows Curiosity to zap and examine targets up to 23 feet (7 meters) away. Credit: J-L. Lacour/CEA/French Space Agency (CNES)
“ChemCam is designed to look for lighter elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, all of which are crucial for life,” said Roger Wiens, principal investigator of the ChemCam team. “The system can provide immediate, unambiguous detection of water from frost or other sources on the surface as well as carbon – a basic building block of life as well as a possible byproduct of life. This makes the ChemCam a vital component of Curiosity’s mission.”
Visit the official ChemCam site for more information.
Image Caption: Martian Soil caked on Curiosity’s right middle and rear wheels after Sol 22 Drive. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Mars Trek has begun for NASA’s Curiosity rover. The mega rover has departed from her touchdown vicinity at “Bradbury Landing” and set off on a multi-week eastwards traverse to her first science target which the team has dubbed “Glenelg”
Glenelg lies about a quarter mile (400 meters) away and the car-sized rover drove about 52 feet (16 meters) on Tuesday, Aug 28 or Sol 22 of the mission.
The science team selected Glenelg as the first target for detailed investigation because it sits at the intersection of three types of geologic terrain, affording the researchers the chance to get a much more comprehensive look at the diversity of geology inside the Gale Crater landing site.
The Sol 22 drive was the third overall for Curiosity and the farthest so far. At this new location, some 33 feet ( 10 m) from Bradbury Landing , the Mastcam color camera is collecting high resolution images to create a 3 D map of features off in the distance that will aid the rover drivers in planning a safe traverse route.
“This drive really begins our journey toward the first major driving destination, Glenelg, and it’s nice to see some Martian soil on our wheels,” said mission manager Arthur Amador of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “The drive went beautifully, just as our rover planners designed it.”
In about a week, the science team plans to deploy the 7 ft (2.1 meter) long robotic arm and test the science instruments in the turret positioned at the terminus of the arm.
“We are on our way, though Glenelg is still many weeks away,” said Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “We plan to stop for just a day at the location we just reached, but in the next week or so we will make a longer stop.”
Perhaps in about a year or so, Curiosity will reach the base of Mount Sharp, her ultimate destination, and begin climbing up the side of the 3.6 mile (5.5 km) high mound in search of hydrated minerals that will shed light on the duration of Mars watery past.
The goal is to determine if Mars ever had habitats capable of supporting microbial life in the past or present during the 2 year long primary mission phase. Curiosity is equipped with a sophisticated array of 10 state of the art science instruments far beyond any prior rover.
Image Caption: Curiosity Points to her ultimate drive destination – Mount Sharp – with unstowed robotic arm on Aug. 20. This navigation camera (Navcam) mosaic was assembled from images on multiple Sols. Curiosity will search for hydrated minerals using the robotic arm and a neutron detector on the body. Image stitching and processing by Ken Kremer and Marco Di Lorenzo. Featured at APOD on 27 Aug 2012. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo
Wow — what a view! This image, released today, is a high-resolution shot of the Curiosity rover’s ultimate goal: the stratified flanks of Gale Crater’s 3.4-mile (5.5-km) high central peak, Mount Sharp. The image was taken with Curiosity’s 100mm telephoto Mastcam as a calibration test… if views like this are what we can expect from the MSL mission, all I can say is (and I’ve said it before) GO CURIOSITY!
“This is an area on Mount Sharp where Curiosity will go,” said Mastcam principal investigator Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems. “Those layers are our ultimate objective. The dark dune field is between us and those layers. In front of the dark sand you see redder sand, with a different composition suggested by its different color. The rocks in the foreground show diversity — some rounded, some angular, with different histories. This is a very rich geological site to look at and eventually to drive through.”
The gravel-strewn region in the foreground is Curiosity’s immediate landing area. Then the ground dips into a low depression called a swale, then rises up again to the edge of a crater that’s rimmed with larger rocks. Quite a bit beyond that (about 2.2 miles/3.7 km away) are fields of dunes composed of darker material, and then the hummocky base of Mount Sharp itself begins to rise up about 3.4 miles (5.5 km) in the distance.
The topmost ridges of Mount Sharp visible above are actually 10 miles (16.2 km) away.
A crop of the full-size image shows a large rock at the foot of a knoll that’s about the same size as Curiosity (which is this big compared to a person and previous rovers):
The rocky mound just behind the boulder in that image is itself about 1,000 feet (300 meters) across and 300 feet (100 meters) high. Gale Crater isn’t a place for a faint-hearted rover!
The colors have been modified from the original image in order to help better discern landforms and differences in surface materials. Here, the images look more like what we’d see under natural Earthly lighting.
Curiosity already is returning more data from the Martian surface than have all of NASA’s earlier rovers combined.
“We have an international network of telecommunications relay orbiters bringing data back from Curiosity,” said JPL’s Chad Edwards, chief telecommunications engineer for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program. “Curiosity is boosting its data return by using a new capability for adjusting its transmission rate.”
“The knowledge we hope to gain from our observation and analysis of Gale Crater will tell us much about the possibility of life on Mars as well as the past and future possibilities for our own planet. Curiosity will bring benefits to Earth and inspire a new generation of scientists and explorers, as it prepares the way for a human mission in the not too distant future.”
– NASA Administrator Charles Bolden in a message transmitted to the Curiosity rover and then back to Earth, August 27, 2012
Images from the Curiosity rover on Mars are truly spectacular but a large mosaic from the THEMIS camera aboard NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter gives a grand perspective of our new foothold on Mars. Take some time to rove and explore Gale Crater.
The viewer, created using a web-imaging technology from Zoomify, is set to move between points of interest, such as Mars Science Laboratory’s landing site in Aeolis Palus, Glenelg, and Aeolis Mons/Mount Sharp itself. The layered sediments flanking Mount Sharp make it the primary target for Curiosity’s two-year mission. Take control at anytime by clicking on the image. This will stop the automatic roving and leave you in control to explore the terrain of Gale Crater. Use your mouse or the toolbar controls to pan and zoom around the image. You can also use the dropdown in the upper right to take you directly to certain points of interest in the image. Over time, we will add to this interactive feature as more geological points of interest are identified.
THEMIS stands for Thermal Emission Imaging System which is a multiband visible and infrared camera aboard Odyssey. The comprehensive mosaic is pieced together from 205 individual scenes, most taken recently but some dating to 2002 shortly after Odyssey entered Mars orbit in 2001. These images were taken before MSL landed on Mars. Even so, as large as the SUV-sized rover is, it would be too small to see in these images. The smallest details in this image are 18 meters or 60 feet across.
This illustration shows the size of Aoelis Mons (Mount Sharp) in comparison to three large mountains on Earth. The elevation of Mount Sharp is given in kilometers above the floor of Gale Crater. The heights of the Earth mountains are given in kilometers above sea level. Image credit: Tanya Harrison, NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Gale Crater is 154 kilometers (96 miles) wide. Near the center rises Aeolis Mons, a 5 km (3 mile) high mound of layered sediments, informally dubbed Mount Sharp, after planetary geologist Robert Sharp who died in 2004. Scientists for a time referred to the conical mountain as “The Mound.” The mountain, which would stand among the highest on Earth, cannot be seen from Earth and was unknown before planetary probes visited the Red Planet.
“The reason we decided to assemble such a large, comprehensive mosaic of Gale Crater was to give ourselves a better sense of the context around the landing site, said Jonathon Hill, a Mars research at Arizona State University who assembled the mosaic, a press release. “This will help us to better understand what Curiosity sees and measures as it roves the surface.”
Gale Crater zoom tour created by John Williams (TerraZoom) using Zoomify.
About the author:John Williams is owner of TerraZoom, a Colorado-based web development shop specializing in web mapping and online image zooms. He also writes the award-winning blog, StarryCritters, an interactive site devoted to looking at images from NASA’s Great Observatories and other sources in a different way. A former contributing editor for Final Frontier, his work has appeared in the Planetary Society Blog, Air & Space Smithsonian, Astronomy, Earth, MX Developer’s Journal, The Kansas City Star and many other newspapers and magazines.
This (adjusted) image was taken by ChemCam’s Remote Micro-Imager on Sol 15 (NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL)
While Curiosity has been getting a good look around its landing spot on Mars, taking in the sights and sending back some impressive views of distant hills and Gale Crater’s enormous central peak, it’s also been peering very closely at some tiny targets just meters away — with its head-mounted, laser-powered and much-touted ChemCam.
The images above and below were acquired by ChemCam’s Remote Micro-Imager on August 21, the 15th “Sol” of the mission. A full-sized image accessed from the public MSL mission site, it’s been brightened quite a bit to show the details of the target rocks.
Mounted to Curiosity’s “head”, just above its Mastcam camera “eyes”, ChemCam combines a powerful laser with a telescope and spectrometer that can analyze the light emitted by zapped materials, thereby determining with unprecedented precision what Mars’ rocks are really made of.
So even though the rover hasn’t actually roved anywhere yet, it’s still performing valuable scientific investigations of Mars — without moving a single wheel. (UPDATE: actually, Curiosity has begun to do some roving — here are some images of its first wheel tracks!)
Because ChemCam uses a laser, Curiosity can examine many targets — up to a dozen — within a small time period without having to drive right up to them. Even the dustiest rocks won’t pose a problem for ChemCam – one or two zaps with its laser will be enough to vaporize any loose surface material.
In addition to searching for the building blocks of life hidden inside rocks, ChemCam will also serve a precautionary role for future explorers by helping identify the potential toxicity of Mars’ soil and dust. When astronauts one day land on Mars, they are going to get dusty. It’s important to know if Mars’ dust contains anything dangerous like lead, arsenic (and who knows what else!)
See the latest images from the MSL mission — including more ChemCam pictures — here.
Images: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL. Edited by J. Major.
