Rising above the present location of NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, higher than any mountain in the 48 contiguous states of the US, Mount Sharp is featured in new imagery from the rover.
This layered mound, also called Aeolis Mons, in the centre of Gale Crater rises more than 5km above the crater floor location of Curiosity. Lower slopes of Mount Sharp remain a destination for the mission, though the rover will first spend many more weeks around a location called Yellowknife Bay, where it has found evidence of a past environment favourable for microbial life.
NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory project is using Curiosity and the rover’s 10 science instruments to investigate environmental history within Gale Crater, a location where the project has found that conditions were long ago favourable for microbial life.
Pictured here is a mosaic of images from the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, showing Mount Sharp in a white-balanced colour adjustment that makes the sky look overly blue but shows the terrain as if under Earth-like lighting.
White-balancing helps scientists recognise rock materials based on their experience of looking at rocks on Earth. The Martian sky would look more butterscotch in colour to the human eye.
White balancing yields an overly blue hue in images that have very little blue information, such as Martian landscapes, because the white balancing tends to overcompensate for the low inherent blue content. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
This layered mound, also called Aeolis Mons, in the centre of Gale Crater rises more than 5km above the crater floor location of Curiosity. Lower slopes of Mount Sharp remain a destination for the mission, though the rover will first spend many more weeks around a location called Yellowknife Bay, where it has found evidence of a past environment favourable for microbial life.
NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory project is using Curiosity and the rover’s 10 science instruments to investigate environmental history within Gale Crater, a location where the project has found that conditions were long ago favourable for microbial life.
Pictured here is a mosaic of images from the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, showing Mount Sharp in a white-balanced colour adjustment that makes the sky look overly blue but shows the terrain as if under Earth-like lighting.
White-balancing helps scientists recognise rock materials based on their experience of looking at rocks on Earth. The Martian sky would look more butterscotch in colour to the human eye.
White balancing yields an overly blue hue in images that have very little blue information, such as Martian landscapes, because the white balancing tends to overcompensate for the low inherent blue content. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
