Trending News

Curiosity Rover: NASA Shares Stunning Images of Martian Dunes (LOOK)

By

In the three-and-a-half years NASA's Curiosity rover has spent on Mars, the bot has captured some truly stunning views of the Red Planet.

The most recent are a collection of shots of the "Namib Dune," which can be seen in high-resolution here and here. Curiosity has traveled more than six miles visiting Mount Sharp and trekking the area Red Planet NASA landed it in Aug. 2012.

But in addition to the new photos, NASA also showed the toll driving around Mars has taken on Curiosity's wheels. While many Americans drive well more than six miles in a day, it is a significant distance on a planet with rough terrain and a highly foreign landscape.

You can see a high-resolution image of one of Curiosity's wheels here.

"The mission's dune-investigation campaign is designed to increase understanding about how wind moves and sorts grains of sand, in an environment with less gravity and much less atmosphere than well-studied dune fields on Earth," NASA said in its statement. "The Bagnold Dunes are active. Sequential images taken from orbit over the course of multiple years show that some of these dunes are migrating by as much as a yard, or meter, per Earth year."

© 2024 University Herald, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Join the Discussion
Real Time Analytics