NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover recently set a record for the steepest terrain it’s ever climbed, cresting the “Greenheugh Pediment,” a wide sheet of rock that sits atop a hillside. As well as before doing that, the Curiosity took a selfie, catching the scene just listed below Greenheugh.
In the image, one can clearly see that there is a hole in front of the rover which it pierced while sampling a bedrock target called “Hutton.” The entire selfie is a 360-degree scenic view sewn together from 86 photos communicated to Planet. The selfie records the rover about 11 feet (3.4 meters) listed below the point where it climbed onto the crumbling pediment.
NASA’s Curiosity rover finally reached the top of the slope March 6 (the 2,696 th Martian day, or sol, of the objective). It took 3 drives to scale the hill, the secondly of which tilted the rover 31 degrees– one of the most the rover has ever tilted on the red planet and also just timid of the now-inactive Opportunity rover’s 32-degree tilt record, set in 2016. Curiosity took the selfie on Feb. 26, 2020 (Sol 2687).
Because 2014, Curiosity has actually been rolling up Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain at the center of Windstorm Crater. Rover operators at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California meticulously draw up each drive to make sure Inquisitiveness will certainly be risk-free. The wanderer is never in danger of tilting so much that it would turn over– Curiosity’s rocker-bogie wheel system enables it to tilt approximately 45 levels safely– however the steep drives do cause the wheels to rotate in position.
Just How Are Selfies Taken?
Prior to the climb, Curiosity utilized the black-and-white Navigation Cameras situated on its pole to, for the very first time, record a short film of its “selfie stick,” or else called its robot arm.
Curiosity’s goal is to examine whether the Martian environment could have sustained microbial life billions of years ago. One tool for doing that is the Mars Hand Lens Video Camera, or MAHLI, situated in the turret at the end of the robotic arm. This video camera offers a close-up view of sand grains and rock textures, in a similar way to just how a geologist makes use of a handheld magnifying glass for a better search in the area in the world.
By rotating the turret to deal with the rover, the group can make use of MAHLI to show Curiosity. Since each MAHLI photo covers only a tiny location, it needs many photos and also arm positions to completely catch the vagabond and also its environments.
” We obtain asked so usually exactly how Inquisitiveness takes a selfie,” claimed Doug Ellison, a Curiosity video camera driver at JPL. “We believed the most effective way to clarify it would be to allow the rover program everyone from its very own viewpoint just exactly how it’s done.”
