Picture: Mont Mercou on Mars…………………………….

Listed below are a couple of beautiful views of the Curiosity Rover’s present location, Mont Mercou in Gale Crater on Mars. This towering outcrop supplies a fantastic have a look at layered sedimentary rock buildings. On Earth, it’s frequent to seek out layered rock like those inside this cliff face, particularly the place there have been as soon as lakes. The pancake-like layers of sediment are compressed and cemented to kind a rock report of the planet’s historical past.

This shade picture is from one among our favourite picture editors, Kevin Gill. He assembled 202 uncooked photos taken by MSL’s MastCam between sols 3057 and 3061. You possibly can see Kevin’s full mosaic on Flickr.

Gale Crater was particularly chosen because the vacation spot for the Curiosity rover from roughly unique 60 candidate websites, as a result of knowledge from orbiting spacecraft decided that Mount Sharp—the massive mountain in the midst of the crater—is created from dozens of layers of sedimentary rock, maybe constructed over thousands and thousands of years. These layers are telling the story of Mars’ geological and local weather historical past, and planetary geologists are having a area day with Mont Mercou.

And the cadre of picture enhancing lovers world wide have been benefiting from this superb rock formation, too. We have now just some examples right here. Right here’s a surprising video created by Mattias Malmer, which provides you a digital stroll round Mont Mercou. Malmer constructed the video from photos taken by Curiosity on sol 3049.

Clouds have been exhibiting up in current Curiosity rover photos, too and Sean Doran put all of it collectively on this nice shot:

“People minds don’t simply comprehend the huge eons of time that separate us from the locations we discover in house with robots like Curiosity,” wrote Scott Guzewich, Atmospheric Scientist at NASA’s Goddard House Flight Heart, and a member of the Mars Curiosity rover science crew, in a weblog publish in regards to the present actions of Curiosity. “Once we discover Mars, we’re roving over rocks that shaped billions of years in the past and plenty of of which have been uncovered on the floor for no less than tens or lots of of thousands and thousands of years. It’s a niche of time that we will perceive numerically, however there’s no technique to have an innate really feel for the unbelievable ancientness of the planet and Gale Crater.”

We’ll fairly doubtless hear far more about Mont Mercou within the days and weeks forward, as scientists start to course of the varied findings right here from Curiosity’s science devices. You possibly can learn all the newest mission updates from Curiosity right here to seek out out which devices are being employed, and discover all of the uncooked photos taken by the rover’s varied cameras right here.

Supply:https://www.universetoday.com/

Picture: Mont Mercou on Mars

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