Don’t forget about NASA Mars Rover Curiosity just because his younger cousin is going to land on the Red Planet.
The curious Curiosity marked 3000 Mars days, or sols, on the Red Planet on Tuesday (January 12), just five weeks before NASA’s Perseverance is scheduled to touch. (A sol is slightly longer than an Earth day and lasts about 24 hours and 40 minutes.)
To celebrate the milestone, the Curiosity team released a beautiful panorama captured by the rover on November 18, 2020. The photo, which consists of 122 stitched images, shows an interesting series of rock “benches” on the slopes of Mount Sharp, which Curiosity has been climbing since September 2014.
Related: Amazing Mars photos by NASA’s Curiosity Rover (latest images)
“Our science team is excited to find out how they formed and what they mean for the ancient environment in Gale,” said Ashwin Vasavada, a Curiosity project scientist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. said in a statement.
“Gale” is Gale Crater, the 96-mile-wide (154-kilometer) hole in the ground that Curiosity has been investigating since touching on August 5, 2012. The rover’s observations showed that the crater offered a potentially habitable lake. and current system in the ancient past, one that probably lasted millions of years.
Mount Sharp rises from downtown Gale about 5.5 kilometers into the air of Mars. Curiosity has been dragging through the massive foothills for more than six years in search of clues about the Red Planet’s transition from a relatively hot and wet world to the cold desert it is today.
Perseverance will land inside the Jezero Crater, which is about 3,700 km from Gale, on February 18th. Perseverance is in many ways similar to Curiosity and shares its basic body plan and dramatic ‘landing crane’ landing strategy. The new rover will do different work, but looking for signs of antique March life within the 28-kilometer-wide (45 km) Jezero, which in the ancient past housed a lake and river delta, and collected samples for future return to Earth, among others.
But perseverance, at the heart of NASA’s $ 2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, is still on its way to the Red Planet. So take a few minutes to appreciate the work Curiosity does on the slopes of a mountain, far from home.
“It’s been an exciting 3,000 sols so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else we’ll discover if Curiosity continues to climb the sharp mountain,” said Lauren Edgar, mission team member, a planetary geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey. Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Arizona, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. “I’ll raise a glass tonight for Curiosity and the science and engineering we’ve got so far!”
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.