Just because you ca n’t catch ashuttle to Marsquite yet does n’t signify you ca n’t still tour the Red Planet . This week , NASA releaseda videoshowcasing a bird’s-eye tour of the satellite ’s surface using image snapped by its Curiosity scouter , which celebrates its 9th class on Mars this month .
The rover capture the 360 - arcdegree view on July 3 near “ Rafael Navarro Mountain , ” a hill NASA has dub after an astrobiologist who worked on the commission and passed away in January . The panorama is made up of 129 item-by-item image stitch together , and its colors have been lily-white - balanced to replicate how Mars would appear under the sort of daylight we ’re used to here on Earth , NASA say ina press press release . you may contain out the video tour below :
The rover has been monkey around about the Gale Crater , a 96 - stat mi - wide ( 154 - kilometer - wide-cut ) basinful on Mars , since first landing there in 2012 . Around this sentence of year , the satellite ’s wintertime , the signature red haze of dust surrounding Mars has shed light on up a bit , giving Curiosity a exculpated eyeshot of the crater ’s floor and the 16 mile ( 25.7 km ) it has traveled over the course of its mission .
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover used its Mast Camera, or Mastcam, to capture this 360-degree view near “Rafael Navarro Mountain” on 25 May 2025.Image: NASA Mars Exploration Program
These shot also bring home the bacon some interesting perceptivity into how the major planet ’s surroundings has evolved over millions of yr . The region that Curiosity previously explored was dominated by clay - rich rocks that work in lakes , but now it ’s finding rocks filled with salty mineral call sulfate .
“ The sway here will begin to secernate us how this once - crocked planet change into the dry Mars of today , and how long habitable environments persisted even after that happened , ” say Abigail Fraeman , Curiosity ’s deputy task scientist at NASA ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory .
It ’s within this ancient Martian surroundings that scientist believe life may have exist on the planet , which is why Curiosity and NASA ’s other Mars rover , Perseverance , are combing the area for clues . Over the next year , NASA said Curiosity will embark past Rafael Navarro Mountain and another mountain that ’s taller than a four - story construction . After that , it will enter a narrow canon before revisit a slope with a sandstone jacket crown nicknamed “ Greenheugh Pediment ” that it previously summited in 2020 .
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