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HomeTech/ScienceNASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Curiosity Rover going up Mount Sharp

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Curiosity Rover going up Mount Sharp

Written by Laurie Cantillo / Dwayne Brown
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NASA - National Aeronautics and Space AdministrationWashington, D.C. – Using the most powerful telescope ever sent to Mars, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter caught a view of the Curiosity rover this month amid rocky mountainside terrain.

The car-size rover, climbing up lower Mount Sharp toward its next destination, appears as a blue dab against a background of tan rocks and dark sand in the enhanced-color image from the orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. The exaggerated color, showing differences in Mars surface materials, makes Curiosity appear bluer than it really looks.

The feature that appears bright blue at the center of this scene is NASA's Curiosity Mars rover amid tan rocks and dark sand on Mount Sharp, as viewed by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on June 5, 2017. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona)
The feature that appears bright blue at the center of this scene is NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover amid tan rocks and dark sand on Mount Sharp, as viewed by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on June 5, 2017. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona)

The image was taken on June 5th, 2017, two months before the fifth anniversary of Curiosity’s landing near Mount Sharp on August 5th PDT (August 6th, 2017, EDT and Universal Time).

When the image was taken, Curiosity was partway between its investigation of active sand dunes lower on Mount Sharp, and “Vera Rubin Ridge,” a destination uphill where the rover team intends to examine outcrops where hematite has been identified from Mars orbit.

The rover’s location that day is shown at https://mars.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/2017/curiositys-traverse-map-through-sol-1717 as the point labeled 1717. Images taken that day by Curiosity’s Mast Camera (Mastcam) are at https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?s=1717&camera=MAST%5F.

HiRISE obtains images of Curiosity a few times each year. The University of Arizona, Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colorado.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project and Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

For more information about NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, visit:

https://mars.nasa.gov/mro/

For more information about NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Project and Curiosity, visit:

https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/

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