This 360-degree panorama was acquired by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover as the rover neared features called ‘Murray Buttes’ on lower Mount Sharp. This 360-degree panorama was acquired by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover as the rover neared features called “Murray Buttes” on lower Mount Sharp. The view combines more than 130 images taken on Aug. 5, 2016, during the afternoon of the mission’s 1,421st sol, or Martian day, by Mastcam’s left-eye camera. This date also was the fourth anniversary of Curiosity’s landing. The dark, flat-topped mesa seen to the left of Curiosity’s robotic arm is about 300 feet (about 90 meters) from the rover’s position. It stands about 50 feet (about 15 meters) high. The horizontal ledge near the top of the mesa is about 200 feet (about 60 meters) across. An upper portion of Mount Sharp appears on the distant horizon to the left of this mesa. The relatively flat foreground is part of a geological layer called the Murray formation, which formed from lakebed mud deposits. The buttes and mesas rising above this surface are eroded remnants of ancient sandstone that originated when winds deposited sand after lower Mount Sharp had formed. Curiosity closely examined that layer — the Stimson formation — during the first half of 2016 while crossing a feature called “Naukluft Plateau” between two exposures of the Murray formation.
Eroded mesas and buttes reminiscent of the US Southwest shape part of the horizon in the latest 360-degree color panorama from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover. The rover used its Mast Camera (Mastcam) to capture dozens of component images of this scene on Aug. 5, 2016, four years after Curiosity’s landing inside Gale Crater. The visual drama of Murray Buttes along Curiosity’s planned route up lower Mount Sharp was anticipated when the site was informally named nearly 3 years ago to honor Caltech planetary scientist Bruce Murray (1931-2013), a former director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. JPL manages the Curiosity mission for NASA.
The buttes and mesas are capped with rock that is relatively resistant to wind erosion. This helps preserve these monumental remnants of a layer that formerly more fully covered the underlying layer that the rover is now driving on.
This stereo scene from the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover shows boulders composed, in part, of pebble-size (0.2 to 2.6 inches, or 0.5 to 6.5 centimeters across) and larger rock fragments. The size and shape of the fragments provide clues to the origins of these boulders. This image is an anaglyph that appears three dimensional when viewed through red-blue glasses with the red lens on the left. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Early in its mission on Mars, Curiosity accomplished its main goal when it found and examined an ancient habitable environment. In an extended mission, the rover is examining successively younger layers as it climbs the lower part of Mount Sharp. A key goal is to learn how freshwater lake conditions, which would have been favorable for microbes billions of years ago if Mars has ever had life, evolved into harsher, arid conditions much less suited to supporting life. The mission is also monitoring the modern environment of Mars.These findings have been addressing high-priority goals for planetary science and further aid NASA’s preparations for a human mission to the Red Planet.
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