A Martian spacecraft spied a Martian rover rumbling by means of the crimson desert.
The brand new picture captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — which has orbited Mars since 2006 — exhibits the area company’s car-sized Curiosity rover traversing the terrain beneath because it scales the planet’s 3.4-mile-high Mount Sharp.
“The picture marks what would be the first time one of many company’s Mars orbiters has captured the rover driving,” NASA mentioned in a press release.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter hosts a robust digital camera — known as the Excessive Decision Imaging Experiment, or HIRISE — which may spot floor objects as small as a kitchen desk from some 160 to 200 miles above the floor. Right here, we see the Curiosity rover as a darkish spot, trailed by the robotic’s tracks as its six metallic wheels crossed the desert.
Mashable Gentle Pace
These tracks, spanning 1,050 ft (320 meters), have been created over 11 separate drives. The orbiter noticed the tracks and rover on Feb. 28.
On Feb. 28, 2025, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured this view of the Curiosity rover exploring the Martian floor.
Credit score: NASA / JPL-Caltech / College of Arizona
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The Curiosity rover has pushed over 21 miles of uneven desert because it landed in 2012, and is now ascending Mount Sharp because it investigates Mars’ climatic and geologic previous. Curiosity’s observations level to a Martian previous, billions of years in the past, that supported floods, lakes, rivers, and even rain. For instance, the rover revealed ripple formations on the floor, which is telltale proof of small waves breaking on lake shores way back. Observations like this counsel that Mars as soon as was heat, moist, and fairly liveable earlier than it regularly reworked into the extraordinarily dry and frigid desert we see right this moment. (At present, Mars is 1,000 instances drier than the driest desert on Earth.)
Curiosity is at present headed to a brand new vacation spot on Mount Sharp, a spot house to expansive and compelling “boxworks” formations. From area, they seem like spiderwebs. They’re “believed to have formed when minerals carried by Mount Sharp’s last pulses of water settled into fractures in surface rock and then hardened,” NASA defined. “As portions of the rock eroded away, what remained were the minerals that had cemented themselves in the fractures, leaving the weblike boxwork.”
As NASA’s rovers discover increasingly more proof of previous water on Mars, it is turning into clear that Mars was as soon as a planet pleasant to life, able to internet hosting the temperate environs that might probably host microbes.
Nonetheless right this moment, nonetheless, there is not any compelling proof that life ever existed on Mars. However there are fairly just a few Martian robots, each lifeless and alive.
