Here are some breathtaking views of the Curiosity rover’s current location, Mont Mercou in Gale Crater on Mars. This towering outcrop offers great insight into layered sedimentary rock structures. It is common on Earth to find layered rocks as found on this cliff, especially where there were once lakes. The pancake-like layers of sediment are compressed and cemented to form a rock record of the planet’s history.
This color image is from one of our favorite photo editors, Kevin Gill. He has compiled 202 raw images captured by MSL’s MastCam between brines 3057 and 3061. You can see Kevin’s full mosaic on Flickr.
The Gale Crater was specifically chosen as the target for the Curiosity Rover from around 60 original candidate locations, as data from orbiting spacecraft indicated that Mount Sharp – the large mountain in the center of the crater – may be made up of dozens of layers of sedimentary rock built over millions of years . These layers tell the story of the geological and climatic history of Mars, and planetary geologists have a field day with Mont Mercou.
The cadre of photo editing enthusiasts around the world have also taken advantage of this amazing rock formation. We only have a few examples here. Here is a stunning video by Mattias Malmer that allows you to take a virtual walk through Mont Mercou. Malmer built the video from images that Curiosity had taken on Sol 3049.
Clouds have appeared in the recent Curiosity Rover pics too, and Sean Doran put it all together in this great shot:
And Stuart Atkinson processed this breathtaking view:
These beautiful views of the clouds in the Martian sky, captured by @MarsCuriosity, will be hailed as classics for years to come, I’m sure … Original images Photo credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / Additional processing S Atkinson pic .twitter.com / uRexjqTyoQ
– mars_stu (@mars_stu) March 22, 2021
What is the bigger view of this area, you ask? Elisabetta Bonora has it covered:
And here’s a close-up of some of those layers reprocessed by Kevin Gill.
MSL Sol 3057 – Mars Curiosity MastCam image, close-up of Mont Mercou. Photo credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / Kevin M. Gill
“The human mind cannot easily understand the vast eons of time that separate us from the places we explore in space with robots like Curiosity,” wrote Scott Guzewich, Atmospheric Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a member of Mars Curiosity Rover science team in a blog post about the current activities of Curiosity. “When we explore Mars, we move over rocks that formed billions of years ago, many of which have been exposed on the surface for at least ten or a hundred million years. It’s a time gap that we can understand numerically, but there’s no way we can have an innate sense of the incredible ancient world of the planet and storm crater. “
We’ll likely hear a lot more about Mont Mercou in the coming days and weeks as scientists begin to process the various insights from Curiosity’s scientific instruments here. Here you can read the latest mission updates from Curiosity to find out what instruments are being used and all the raw images captured by the rover’s various cameras can be found here.
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