NASA'S CURIOSITY MARS ROVER LOOKS AT TARGET

FROM:   NASA 

This image from the Navigation Camera (Navcam) on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows a sandstone slab on which the rover team has selected a target, "Windjana," for close-up examination and possible drilling.  The target is on the approximately 2-foot-wide (60-centimeter-wide) rock seen in the right half of this view.  The Navcam's left-eye camera took this image during the 609th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars (April 23, 2014). The rover's name is written on the covering for a portion of the robotic arm, here seen stowed at the front of the vehicle. The sandstone target's informal name comes from Windjana Gorge in Western Australia.  If this target meets criteria set by engineers and scientists, it could become the mission's third drilled rock and the first that is not mudstone. The rock is within a waypoint location called "the Kimberley," where sandstone outcrops with differing resistance to wind erosion result in a stair-step pattern of layers.  Windjana is within what the team calls the area's "middle unit," because it is intermediate between rocks that form buttes in the area and lower-lying rocks that show a pattern of striations. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed and built the project's Curiosity rover and the rover's Navcam.  NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Inspects Site Image Credit-NASA-JPL-Caltech.

MARS MOSAIC

FROM: NASA
Panoramic View From Near 'Point Lake' in Gale Crater, Sol 106

This panorama is a mosaic of images taken by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on the NASA Mars rover Curiosity during the 106th Martian day, or sol, of the mission (Nov. 22, 2012). The rover was near a location called "Point Lake" for an overlook of a shallow depression called "Yellowknife Bay" which is in the left third of this scene, in the middle distance.

The image spans 360 degrees, with south at the center. It has been white-balanced to show what the rocks and soils in it would look like if they were on Earth.

Image Credit-NASA-JPL-Caltech-Malin Space Science Systems