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inothernews:

LOOKER  A mosaic of images from the Curiosity rover’s Mars Hand Lens Imager on Oct. 31 shows the rover’s camera mast and deck. The pictures were taken during operations at a Martian sampling site known as Rocknest. (Photo: NASA / CalTech / JPL via NBC News)

It’s the Mars rover equivalent of a Facebook profile pic self shot.

inothernews:

TOKEN / TAKEN  A photo of the calibration target for the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) aboard NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, taken by that camera on Mars. The calibration target includes colour references, a metric bar graphic, a 1909 VDB Lincoln penny, and a stair-step pattern for depth calibration. The penny is a nod to geologists’ tradition of placing a coin or other object of known scale as a size reference in close-up photographs of rocks.  (NASA via The Telegraph)

Layers at the Base of Mount Sharp

A chapter of the layered geological history of Mars is laid bare in this postcard from NASA’s Curiosity rover. The image shows the base of Mount Sharp, the rover’s eventual science destination.

This image is a portion of a larger image taken by Curiosity’s 100-millimeter Mast Camera on Aug. 23, 2012. See http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA16104. Scientists enhanced the color in one version to show the Martian scene under the lighting conditions we have on Earth, which helps in analyzing the terrain. 

For scale, an annotated version of the figure highlights a dark rock that is approximately the same size as Curiosity. The pointy mound in the center of the image, looming above the rover-sized rock, is about 1,000 feet (300 meters) across and 300 feet (100 meters) high. 

To see a close-up of the layered buttes of Mount Sharp, see http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA16105. 

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS 

First Laser-Zapped Rock on Mars

This composite image, with magnified insets, depicts the first laser test by the Chemistry and Camera, or ChemCam, instrument aboard NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover. The composite incorporates a Navigation Camera image taken prior to the test, with insets taken by the camera in ChemCam. The circular insert highlights the rock before the laser test. The square inset is further magnified and processed to show the difference between images taken before and after the laser interrogation of the rock. 

The test took place on Aug. 19, 2012.

In the composite, the fist-sized rock, called “Coronation,” is highlighted. Coronation is the first rock on any extraterrestrial planet to be investigated with such a laser test. 

The widest context view in this composite comes from Curiosity’s Navigation Camera. The magnified views in the insets come from ChemCam’s camera, the Remote Micro-Imager. The area shown in the circular inset is 6 centimeters (2.4 inches) in diameter. It was taken before the rock was hit with the laser. The area covered in the further-magnified square inset is 8 millimeters (about one-third of an inch) across. It combines information from images taken before and after the test, subtracting the “before” image from the “after” image to make the changes in the rock visible.

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Orbiter Views NASA’s New Mars Rover In Color

PASADENA, Calif. — The first color image taken from orbit showing NASA’s rover Curiosity on Mars includes details of the layered bedrock on the floor of Gale Crater that the rover is beginning to investigate.

Operators of the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter added the color view to earlier observations of Curiosity descending on its parachute, and one day after landing.

“The rover appears as double bright spot plus shadows from this perspective, looking at its shadowed side, set in the middle of the blast pattern from the descent stage,” said HiRISE Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen, of the University of Arizona, Tucson. “This image was acquired from an angle looking 30 degrees westward of straight down. We plan to get one in a few days looking more directly down, showing the rover in more detail and completing a stereo pair.”

Meanwhile, Curiosity has finished a four-day process transitioning both of its redundant main computers to flight software for driving and using tools on the rover’s arm. During the latter part of the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft’s 36-week flight to Mars and its complicated descent to deliver Curiosity to the Martian surface on Aug. 5, PDT (Aug. 6, EDT and Universal Time), the rover’s computers used a version of flight software with many capabilities no longer needed. The new version expands capabilities for work the rover will do now that it is on Mars.

read more at the link above.

It still amazes me every time I think of the fact that we’ve got satellites in orbit around Mars that can take pictures of a robot we landed on the surface.

Mars - in glorious color! - While we have color images of the surface of Mars from previous missions, these missions used filters to take pictures at wavelengths that approximated red blue and green, but the colors were always skewed because the wavelengths were not “exact” (for example, I think the ‘red’ filter took pictures that were right on the edge of infra-red).

This is the first ‘true color’ image taken of the surface of another planet, taken with a camera that works more like a consumer model.

Full resolution image

The image’s page on NASA’s photo journal.

Reddit user lazyink stitched together the available NavCam images from the Curiosity Rover. The above picture is the result!

discoverynews:

Mars Rover Snaps Stunning Self-Portrait

NASA put together this artsy image of Mars rover Opportunity getting a glimpse of its own shadow on the rim of Endeavour Crater. The robotic geologist used its panoramic camera to take about a dozen shots using an assortment of filters between about 4:30 and 5 p.m. Mars time on March 9.

The images were transmitted back to Earth where a team of scientists assembled them into this mosaic, which was released Wednesday.

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Aw man! The solar panels are so dusty!!!

(via inothernews)