Thu, Aug 08, 2013
MRO Snaps Photo Of Curiosity Showing Rover, Tracks
An image from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter released Wednesday shows NASA's Curiosity Mars rover and the wheel tracks from its landing site to the "Glenelg" area where the rover worked for the first half of 2013.
The orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera captured the scene on June 27, 2013, with the orbiter rolled for an eastward-looking angle rather than straight downward. The afternoon sun illuminated the scene from the western sky, so the lighting was nearly behind the camera. This geometry hides shadows and reveals subtle color variations.
Curiosity that day was examining an outcrop called "Shaler," the rover mission's final science target in the Glenelg area before commencing a many-month trek southwestward to an entry point for the lower layers of Mount Sharp. The rover appears as a bright blue spot in the enhanced coloring of the image.
The image shows two scour marks at the Bradbury Landing site where the Mars Science Laboratory mission's skycrane landing system placed Curiosity onto the ground on Aug. 6, 2012, EDT and Universal Time (Aug. 5, PDT). The scour marks are where the landing system's rockets cleared away reddish surface dust. Visible tracks commencing at the landing site show the path the rover traveled eastward to Glenelg.
(NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity appears as a bluish dot near the lower right corner of this enhanced-color view from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter)
More News
An Amazing Experience Awaits The Chosen Few... Oshkosh, to us, seems the perfect place to get started on watching aviation recover the past couple of years... and so ANN is putting>[...]
“NBAA has a tremendous responsibility to the business aviation industry, and we are constantly collaborating with them. Our flight departments, professionals and aircraft own>[...]
Dead Reckoning Dead reckoning, as applied to flying, is the navigation of an airplane solely by means of computations based on airspeed, course, heading, wind direction, and speed,>[...]
Aero Linx: Vertical Aviation Safety Team (VAST) We are a public–private initiative to enhance worldwide flight operations safety in all segments of the vertical flight indust>[...]
We're Everywhere... Thanks To You! Even with the vast resources and incredibly far-reaching scope of the Aero-News Network, every now and then a story that should be reported on sl>[...]