Curiosity Rover Sends ‘Selfie’ From Mars

NASA has released a “selfie” from Mars of its Curiosity rover.

The 360 degree panoramic image is made from photos taken from a camera on the rover’s mast on Aug. 9. The photo shows the rover at Vera Rubin Ridge.

Curiosity had just drilled for a rock sample.

The photo shows a thin layer of dust coating the robot explorer; during the summer dust storms enveloped the Red Planet.

“Mars experienced two large dust storms over its northern hemisphere during the week of May 28 to June 3, 2018,” NASA previously reported.

NASA said that the sky is dark in the photo because of dust still in the atmosphere.

Unlike NASA’s older rover, Opportunity, Curiosity is nuclear-powered and unaffected by the lack of sunlight.

Curiosity landed on Mars on Aug. 6, 2012, at Gale Crater. Its mission is to “investigate whether conditions have been favorable for microbial life and for preserving clues in the rocks about possible past life,” according to NASA.

It has a suite of instruments called Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM).

SAM analyzes Martian material collected by the rover. NASA says its analysis tools can identify many materials that contain carbon, which can sometimes indicate life. It can also figure out the ratios of different isotopes, which NASA says can help us understand Mars’s atmospheric and water history.

The first samples that Curiosity ever drilled from Martian rocks gave evidence of conditions that could have supported life in Mars’ early history, Nasa said. The evidence was geological and mineralogical, and suggested there was “sustained liquid water, other key elemental ingredients for life, a chemical energy source, and [that the] water not too acidic or too salty.”

Later, Curiosity figured out the age of its Martian rock sample; the rock was 4.2 billion years old, and exposed at the surface of the planet for 80 million years.

NASA has said that researchers hope to find “further evidence about habitable past environments and about the evolution of the Martian environment from a wetter past to a drier present,” during the rover’s extended mission. Curiosity’s job is to explore Mars and “collect, grind, distribute, and analyze approximately 70 samples of soil and rock.” It was meant to do this for one Martian year (687 Earth days). Having done that, it is now on extended missions.

Opportunity Lost

NASA lost contact with its older, solar-reliant rover named Opportunity in June, and has not had contact since.

Opportunity and Spirit were twin rovers that preceded Curiosity. They landed on Mars on January 2004. Opportunity and Spirit completed their initial 3-month mission that April and then went onto “bonus overtime work.”

NASA has not had communication with Spirit in 2010, after it was unable to collect the solar energy it needed to run its “survival heaters” during the cold Martian winter.

Now Opportunity may be lost too. After almost 15 years exploring the planet—more than 14 years after completing its original mission—NASA says Opportunity may not have the strength for a comeback.

Flight controllers hope as the Martian sky clears, Opportunity will get back in contact.

Hitting the Jackpot

Opportunity and Spirit were tasked with looking for clues that Mars had areas that were once “wet enough to be hospitable to life.”

NASA said Opportunity “hit the jackpot” within three months of arriving. It found evidence that there was once salty water “deep enough to splash around in” flowing over an area it explored.

This suggested an environment that could have been hospitable to life and could even have preserved fossil evidence of that.

By September 2004, the twin solar-powered robots had been approved for a second extension of their missions, but were “beginning to show signs of aging.”

Spirit’s front right wheel was damaged. Controllers at NASA had to drive the rover in reverse, dragging its “balky wheel.”

NASA didn’t know how long the rovers would survive, but they had “already racked up successes beyond the high expectations set for them when the Mars Exploration Rover project began.”