Nearly 14 years ago, NASA’s Curiosity rover landed on Mars for a mission to explore the red planet and discover if it had an environment capable of supporting microbial life.
Over the years, the rover has also been beaming back striking images of its surroundings, including the stunner at the top of this page captured toward the end of last year.
It’s actually a composite combining two images — one taken in the morning and the other in the early evening.
Originally black and white, color was later added, with blue representing the morning panorama and yellow representing the afternoon one.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is overseeing the Mars mission, says that merging images in this way helps to bring out details in the landscape.
“The scene captured in this postcard shows Curiosity at the top of a ridge referred to as a boxwork formation,” JPL explains on its website. “These formations crisscross a region in the lower foothills of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain which Curiosity has been climbing since 2014.”
It adds: “The boxwork formations are believed to have been created billions of years ago when water on ancient Mars dripped through rock cracks, carrying minerals with them. The minerals hardened after the water dried up; eons later, wind sandblasted the softer rock around these hardened minerals, exposing the ridges Curiosity is exploring today.”
The image was taken from the floor of Gale Crater, with the crater’s rim visible around 25 miles (40 kilometers) away.
Look closely and you can also see the rover’s wheel tracks leading from a place named as Valle de la Luna where last year Curiosity drilled for a rock sample.
The Curiosity mission was designed to last less than two years, so the fact that the rover is still trundling along and communicating with Earth is a testament to its robust design and NASA’s impressive engineering skills.
Since Curiosity’s arrival, NASA has dropped off another even more advanced rover — Perseverance. Arriving in spectacular fashion in 2021, the newer rover is also continuing to explore the martian surface, with some of its efforts paving the way for the first-ever crewed mission, which could take place in the 2030s.