NASA’s Curiosity rover captured am amazing image perched on the side of Mars’ Mount Sharp. The rover is capable of capturing a 360° view of its environment with its black-and-white navigation cameras each time it completes a drive. However, the rover typically keeps the images in a compressed, low-quality format, to make it easier to transmit back to Earth. This scene was just too incredible not to capture it in the highest quality that the navigation cameras are capable of.
When was this captured? On Nov. 16, 2021 when engineers commanded Curiosity to take two sets of mosaics at 8:30 a.m. and again at 4:10 p.m. local Mars time. Capturing these mosaics at two different times of day provided contrasting lighting conditions that really brought out a variety of landscape details. These were then combined to include elements from the morning scene in blue, the afternoon scene in orange, and a combination of both in green.
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At the far right of the panorama is the craggy ‘Rafael Navarro Mountain,’ named after a Curiosity team scientist who passed away earlier this year. Poking up behind it is the upper part of Mount Sharp, far above the area Curiosity is exploring,” said the JPL team.
