June 24th this week saw the first anniversary of the arrival of NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover on the Red Planet and in celebration NASA released a ‘selfie’ image of the rover.
But how come you might ask? Surely the rover landed on 6th August 2012 which is far more than a year?
And you would indeed be correct – but we are celebrating the first full Martian year, which is equivalent to 687 Earth solar days.
The picture is in fact a composite of many pictures taken between April and May this year by a camera located at the end of the rover’s robotic arm. And the place on Mars is a site called Windjana, where the rover has been collecting rock powder samples from a hole it drilled in the surface.
This NASA project, with a cost of around 2.5 billion dollars, has already achieved the main goal of its mission by finding evidence of the presence of a lake bed on the planet surface, suggesting that Mars might once have had the necessary requirements for life. The next and final stop for Curiosity will be Mount Sharp where the search for evidence of the planet's potential to sustain life will continue.
But how come you might ask? Surely the rover landed on 6th August 2012 which is far more than a year?
And you would indeed be correct – but we are celebrating the first full Martian year, which is equivalent to 687 Earth solar days.
The picture is in fact a composite of many pictures taken between April and May this year by a camera located at the end of the rover’s robotic arm. And the place on Mars is a site called Windjana, where the rover has been collecting rock powder samples from a hole it drilled in the surface.
This NASA project, with a cost of around 2.5 billion dollars, has already achieved the main goal of its mission by finding evidence of the presence of a lake bed on the planet surface, suggesting that Mars might once have had the necessary requirements for life. The next and final stop for Curiosity will be Mount Sharp where the search for evidence of the planet's potential to sustain life will continue.
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