Making Yourself at Home on Mars

One of the most interesting results of NASA's policy to make its planetary images widely and freely available is that talented photographers around the world have combined and extended the photos to make clearer or wider views of what it's like to be on another world.

A wonderful example can be found at a site for panoramic (360-degree) images, where photographer Andrew Bodrov has made one of the most exciting space images I have yet seen:
http://www.360cities.net/image/mars-gigapixel-panorama-curiosity-solar-days-136-149#-410.49,13.54,42.5

Bodrov stitched together 407 different images from two different cameras aboard the Curiosity rover on the red planet Mars. You can see the rover itself and the "Yellowknife Bay" neighborhood that it was exploring at the time that it did the first experiment drilling into a Mars rock. The large mountain in the distance is Mt. Sharp, the rover's ultimate destination.

I encourage you to play with the image for a while. There are controls at the upper left to help you move around and your cursor also gives you control of the speed and direction with which you move through this rich image. Enjoy the details of the rover's machinery and the wide range of rock formations around the little robot visitor.

Curiosity Mars Rover Takes a Self-Portrait

At the beginning of November, the Curiosity rover on Mars used a camera on its big arm to take this wonderful panoramic picture of itself and its surroundings. Dozens of individual pictures were stitched together carefully to make this self-portrait. 

You can see four little trenches in the front where the arm scooped up some martian dirt for analysis.

Curiously, the way the images are taken and assembled, the arm is NOT visible in the picture. (You could imagine something similar if you held a camera out way in front of you and then took pictures from all sides. You could crop and assemble those pictures in a way so that your arm is always out of sight on the final image.)

In the background, on the upper right, you can see Mount Sharp, the mountain in the center of Gale Crater, which is the rover's ultimate destination. (See my blog post of August 19, 2012 for more on this mountain and its location.)

So far, all the instruments on board Curiosity are working fine, and the mission -- one of the most exciting astronomy events of the past year -- is continuing to send back good information from our red neighbor planet. As expected, we are already seeing clear evidence that there was lots of flowing water on Mars in the distant past.

P.S. If you are interested, you can see an animation of how this complex picture was taken and put together at:
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=156880341

An Interesting New Picture from Mars

Curiosity (the new Mars Rover) has been driving around a bit, testing all its instruments. Here is my favorite new image, showing some of the interesting geological (or should that be marsolog

ical?) features we encounter as we look toward Mount Sharp, the rover's target.

In this picture, taken by the camera on Curiosity's big mast, we are looking toward the base of Mt. Sharp. You can see the many layers in the rock that were probably the result of standing water in the great basin (crater) that Mt. Sharp is in the middle of. The little inset shows a dark rock that is about the same size as our rover. So the pyramid-shaped mound behind it is much bigger than our vehicle. Exploration in this region will take much skillful maneuvering when it starts.

Bear in mind that Mars today has no liquid water to speak of, so that the scenes we will see will remind us of the deserts of the Earth.  But we have excellent evidence that ancient Mars, which had a thick atmosphere, had liquid water galore -- rivers, lakes, maybe even oceans.