A beautiful image of the Marker Band Valley was included in a postcard that NASA’s Curiosity rover sent back from Mars. Using its black-and-white navigation cameras, two panoramas obtained on April 8, 2023, were combined to make the image.
The picture shows the area as the robot would have seen it before moving on to investigate Gale Crater in search of signs of organic compounds that might be indicative of life.
NASA’s Curiosity Rover
The surface and geology of Mars have been captured by the Curiosity rover, which was launched in August 2012. The image, which was originally black and white but has been colored, demonstrates the stark variations in illumination at Marker Band Valley.
The contrast between dawn and afternoon exposes minute features of the scene as observed by Curiosity. The black shadows are caused by sunlight flowing in from the left and right, similar to how it would on a stage, according to NASA engineer Doug Ellison, who was a member of the team that prepared and analyzed the photographs.
- NASA Curiosity rover returns Mars postcard featuring Marker Band Valley.
- Curiosity rover captures Mars’s surface, geology, and illumination variations.
- NASA seeks Martian radiation environment information for Mars mission.
Curiosity’s perspective of the morning sky was depicted by the addition of blue, and its view of the afternoon sky by the addition of yellow. Nearly eleven years after the rover’s initial landing on Mars, the postcard was taken.
The picture depicts Curiosity’s perspective from Mount Sharp’s flank, a 3-mile-tall mountain in the so-called “sulfate-bearing region.” The rover can also make out the hills “Bolvar” and “Deepdale” as well as the “Paraitepuy Pass” channel.
Due to the winter at Curiosity’s location, which also corresponds to a season when airborne dust is less, the shadows in the image are deeper than typical. Important components of the robot, like its three antennae, nuclear power supply, and Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD), are also depicted on the Curiosity postcard.
NASA, which plans to send personnel to Mars in the late 2030s or early 2040s, is very interested in the information that RAD is accumulating about the Martian radiation environment.
