NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover uses its black-and-white navigation camera to capture a panoramic view of this scene twice a day. This is the sight of Mars at 4:10 pm local time. Image source: NASA/JPL-Caltech Full image details

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover uses its black-and-white navigation camera to capture a panoramic view of this scene twice a day. This is the sight of Mars at 8:30 AM local time. Image source: NASA/JPL-Caltech Full image details

The artistic interpretation of Curiosity's high altitude landscape on Mars Mountain was created by mission team members who were shocked by the unobstructed view.

NASA’s Curiosity rover recently captured an extraordinary image in its perch on the Mars side of Mount Sharp. The mission team was deeply inspired by the beauty of the landscape. They combined two versions of black and white images at different times of the day and added colors to create a rare postcard from the red planet.

Every time Curiosity finishes driving, it uses its black and white navigation camera to capture a 360-degree view of the surrounding environment. To make it easier to send the generated panorama to the earth, the rover saves it in a compressed, low-quality format. But when the rover team saw the scenery from the closest stop of Curiosity, the scene was too beautiful to capture it at the highest quality that the navigation camera could achieve.

Many of the most stunning panoramas of rover vehicles come from color mast cameras, which have much higher resolution than navigation cameras. This is why the team added its own color to this latest image. Blue, orange, and green are not visible to the human eye; instead, they represent scenes viewed at different times of the day.

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On November 16, 2021 (the 3,299th Martian day or sol of the mission), the engineer ordered Curiosity to take two sets of mosaic or composite images to capture the scene at local Martian time at 8:30 am and 4:10 pm, respectively. Contrasting lighting conditions are provided twice in a day, bringing a variety of landscape details. Then, the team combined these two scenes for artistic re-creation, including blue morning scenes, orange afternoon scenes, and green combined elements.

In the center of the image is the view of Mount Sharp, the 3-mile-high (5 kilometers-high) mountain that Curiosity has been pushing since 2014. Curiosity took a closer look at these as early as July, when the rovers began to see interesting changes in the landscape. The sand wave field called "Forvie Sands" stretches for a quarter to half a mile (400 to 800 meters).

On the far right of the panorama is the rugged "Rafael Navarro Mountain" named after the Curiosity team scientist who died earlier this year. Protruding behind it is the upper part of Mount Sharp, much higher than the area Curiosity is exploring. Mount Sharp is located in Gale Crater, a 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers wide) basin formed by ancient impacts; the remote edge of Gale Crater is 7,500 feet (2.3 kilometers) high, and is approximately 18 to 25 miles (30 kilometers) high. To 40 kilometers away) can be seen on the horizon.

The Curiosity mission is led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/home/

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California

andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov

karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov

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