Ever lost track of time gazing the ever-charming stars? What about gazing from Mars? Sounds interesting, right? NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover stops to stargaze sporadically. Curiosity is a car-sized Rover designed to observe and explore the crater Gale on Mars, as a part of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission, abbreviated as MSL. The ultimate mission of the Curiosity is to ascertain whether Mars was ever habitable or is it now to microbial life. The Rover has seventeen cameras and a robotic arm, containing room for specialized laboratories like tools and instruments. Even though the Martian atmosphere is dusty, Curiosity managed to capture shots of Venus and Earth about seventy-five minutes after sunset on the June 5, 2020, the 2,784th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.
To capture those shots, Curiosity used the same instrument it usually employs to take Martian panoramas, the Mast Camera or the Mastcam. Spotting the planets was not the solitary objective of this session, the members of the mission also wanted to look at the Martian twilight brightness. Mars takes about 687 Earth days to orbit the sun once. One day in Mars is about thirty-seven minutes longer than one in the Earth. More specifically, one day in Mars is one day, zero hours, thirty-seven minutes in the Earth. The rear end of the image shows the top of the rock feature named Tower Buttle. The major accomplishments of the Rover include capturing the blue Martian sunsets, passing asteroids as well as Mercury and Mars’s moons Phobos and Deimos, transiting across the sun. The Martian sunsets would appear blue to the observers from Mars. Fine dust makes the colour blue near the Sun’s part of the sky much more evident. Normal daylight makes Mars’s familiar rusty dust colour making it a Red Planet.
References: NASA
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