NASA has released a panorama from its Curiosity rover looking back over Gale Crater. The rover took it a full kilometer above the crater floor where it landed 14 years ago. Look at the wheel rut at the bottom of the frame, though. The team dug it on purpose.
Curiosity took the picture on Sept. 5, about a week and a half after it passed the kilometer mark in late August. It's stitched together from dozens of frames shot by Mastcam, the rover's main camera. NASA adjusted the colors to show roughly how the scene would look in daylight on Earth. The crater's rim runs along the far horizon.
Mission scientist William Farrand of the Space Science Institute gave a handy comparison. When the Spirit rover reached the top of Husband Hill in August 2005, that was a climb of about 106 meters (348 feet), roughly a tenth of Curiosity's gain. Curiosity has been working its way up Mount Sharp, the mountain in the middle of the crater, since 2014.
Why the rover drove into the sand
The ridge across the foreground is a sand feature built by the wind, and the team calls it "Chocolatal". Scientists want to know if it's a transverse aeolian ridge, or TAR. Orbiters have spotted TARs "across the Martian surface," and the long axis of each one runs perpendicular to the local prevailing wind, according to the mission blog. So the team drove the right front wheel into it and scuffed open a trench to see inside.
Farrand said the team wants to learn "how the ridge formed, whether it is active, how it has migrated" and, if it no longer moves, what keeps it in place. The clues are the layers in the trench walls and the size of the sand grains.
Getting those clues took some work. University of Calgary geochemist Benjamin Tutolo wrote that the week's planning was harder because of a "Dog's Eye" mosaic: close-ups of the trench walls shot from near the ground, the way a dog would see them. The rover's arm also took chemistry readings inside the scuff and on untouched sand beside it.
Curiosity has now spent more than 5,000 Martian days on Mars and is still climbing. This isn't the first possible TAR it has studied, but it sits higher on Mount Sharp, and the team wants to know whether it's made of the same sand as the lower ones or has different grain sizes and layering. NASA hasn't said when those results will be out. After the trench work, the plan called for a short drive and chemistry readings on a nearby gray stone.
Sources
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