NASA's Curiosity Rover sends postcard perfect picture from Mars

New Delhi : NASA's Curiosity Rover is roaming on Mars, exploring the microbial life on it and also sending remarkable facts about the planet with mesmerizing views. Recently, the rover sent black and white pictures of a beautiful landscape on the red planet.

The researchers combined two black and white pictures and added colours to them, making it a postcard-perfect picture.

Normally, Curiosity captures a 360-degree view of its surroundings with its black-and-white navigation cameras each time it completes a drive. To keep it easy and fast to send to Earth, the images are compressed to low-quality format; but when the rover team saw the view from Curiosity’s most recent stopping point, the scene was just too pretty not to capture it in the highest quality that the navigation cameras are capable of.

Many of the rover’s most stunning panoramas are from the colour Mastcam instrument, which has far higher resolution than the navigation cameras. That’s why the team added colours of their own to this latest image. The blue, orange and green tints are not what the human eye would see; instead, they represent the scene as viewed at different times of the day.

On Nov. 16, 2021 (the 3,299th Martian day, or sol, of the mission), engineers commanded Curiosity to take two sets of mosaics, or composite images, capturing the scene at 8:30 a.m. and again at 4:10 p.m. local Mars time. The two times of day provided contrasting lighting conditions that brought out a variety of landscape details. The team then combined the two scenes in an artistic re-creation that includes elements from the morning scene in blue, the afternoon scene in orange, and a combination of both in green.

(Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The end result is just mesmerizing and will make you fall in love with the red planet. The Curiosity mission is led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California.

Information Source: NASA