The HiRISE camera aboard NASA s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured this photo of the Curiosity rover ascending Mont Mercou on April 18, 2021. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona)
Curiosity landed inside the 96-mile-wide (154 km) Gale Crater in August 2012, on a mission to determine if the area could ever have supported microbial life. The answer to this question is yes; the six-wheeled robot s observations have shown that Gale hosted a
In September 2014, Curiosity reached the foothills of Mount Sharp, which rises high into the Martian sky from Gale s center. The rover has been climbing the mountain ever since, examining the layered rock deposits for clues about Mars long-ago transition from a relatively warm and wet world to the cold desert planet that it is today.
FOTO: Nave de la NASA capta a Curiosity explorando Mont Mercou en Marte sinembargo.mx - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sinembargo.mx Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
MRO captured the image on April 18 using its High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment tool (HiRISE), which can spot features as small as a kitchen table. So, even at an altitude of 270km above the rover at the time, the car-sized Curiosity rover was in plain sight, according to the HiRISE team’s image description.
Since 2014, Curiosity has been climbing the 5km-high Mount Sharp, the central peak of the Gale Crater. Its mission has been to scour the red planet for past signs of microbial life. In early March, Curiosity began approaching Mont Mercou, which is named after a mountain in France, as Insider reported.
Goddard Space Center Chief Scientist Jim Garvin provides insight on ‘Fox New Live.’
The photos were captured using the agency s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), a spacecraft that has studied the Martian atmosphere and the planet s terrain from orbit for 15 years.
The MRO is equipped with the powerful High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, which has aided in a number of discoveries.
HiRISE took the picture on April 18 from an altitude of 167.5 miles above the rover, according to the image s description from Arizona s HiRISE Operations Center. NASA s Curiosity rover ascends Mars Mont Mercou in an aerial image captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter s (MRO) HiRISE camera. (Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)