There is an old saying that goes “time stops for no one”. Well, it certainly didn’t stop for NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover either. It is time to celebrate Curiosity’s eighth anniversary on the Red Planet . Curiosity rover was launched in November 2011 and landed on the planet Mars on 6th of August 2012 (or 5th August depending on your location).
Curiosity Mars rover landed in Gale Crater with a main goal of determining if Mars was ever able to support microbial life. The rover has travelled more than 23 kilometers on mars so far. On this journey,rover drilled 26 rock samples and scooped around six soil samples. This has led to revealing that ancient Mars was indeed suitable for life. Using the data from Curiosity Rover,scientists have found evidence for long-lived lakes. That is the exact reason why scientists chose Gale Crater as its landing site. This particular crater had already shown many signs that water was present over its history. Rover has also dug up organic compounds ,or in other words, chemical building blocks of life.
“This area is one of the reasons we came to Gale Crater.We’ve been studying orbiter images of this area for 10 years, and we’re finally able to take a look up close,”said Kristen Bennett of the U.S. Geological Survey.
A Dusty Scientist :
The Curiosity mission is led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California . Rover has captured and sent us many pictures from mars including a selfie. Most of the panoramas were taken by the rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, led by Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego. NASA describes the latest released images as a “Spaghetti Western landscape”. Curiosity snapped the 130 images used for this panorama in late 2019. It shows a spot called Western Butte in the foreground.
Now NASA has launched another mars rover called Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter drone. Let’s wish the Perseverance rover to have its predecessor’s longevity . Click here to read an article about the Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter.
Reference : NASA
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