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NASA unveils a never-before-seen postcard of a Martian landscape


NASA released an image captured by the Curiosity rover last April on Tuesday, June 13, 2023, at two different times of the day. The space agency combined the two images by adding colors to offer a striking panorama.

This image is an artistic and recolorized interpretation of two black and white images taken by the Curiosity rover at two times during the same Martian day. | NASA/JPL-CALTECH/VIA REUTERS

It is a postcard landscape of the planet Mars which has just been unveiled by NASA on Tuesday June 13, 2023 on its website. The American agency was able to design it thanks to the Curiosity rover which captured two panoramic shots of the Martian surface, at two different times of the day, reports CNN .

Two episodes on the same shot

On April 8, 2023, the rover was in the foothills of Mount Sharp, which rises 5 km high in Gale Crater. It faced the Marker Band Valley. He then used his black-and-white navigation cameras to take a snap at 9:20 a.m. and another at 3:40 p.m. local Mars time. Two very different episodes in a Martian day that a NASA team colorized in post-processing. The blue sky is similar to the morning and the dominant orange-yellow to the afternoon.

“Anyone who has been to a National Park knows that the scene is different in the morning and in the afternoon”said Curiosity engineer Doug Ellison, who planned and processed the images. “Capturing two times of day provides dark shadows because the lighting comes from the left and right, like you might have on a stage. But instead of stage lights, we rely on SamaGame”.

The discovery of an ancient lake

NASA had already published a color postcard of black and white photos of the Martian vehicle in November 2021. Again, blue and orange-yellow filters had been used. Note that the shadows are more pronounced in this image, as the panoramas were taken in winter at Gale Crater, when the airborne dust is closer to the surface. “Mars shadows become sharper and deeper when there is little dust and softer when there is a lot of dust”explains Doug Ellison.

The rover was facing Marker Band Valley, a winding area in which the craft made a few discoveries, such as “the unexpected signs of an ancient lake”, comments NASA. In the image, we also see the two hills that are “Bolivar” and “Deepdale” and that the rover has already traveled.

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NASA unveils a majestic photo of the planet Mars captured by Curiosity


Headlamp on the head, the researcher Dominique Genty rushes several times a year, since 1992, in the kilometers of underground galleries of Villars, in the Dordogne, in the south-west of France to decipher the evolution of the climate. .Under a metal platform allowing tourists to admire the silhouettes of horses drawn 20,000 years ago or the magical spectacle of thousands of stalagmites, stalactites and other limestone veil flows, the Perigord paleoclimatologist shows two holes drilled during his research on “speleothems”, these mineral deposits of the underground environment. The cave contains invaluable information: the oxygen present in the infiltrated rainwater, accumulated and dissolved underground to form, over the millennia, limestone concretions , and carbon, from the succession of plants above the cave. By fixing the two elements, these stalagmites have “recorded” the climate of the past. “Their variation is linked to the abundance or not of vegetation at the above the cave, and as the presence of vegetation on the surface is directly linked to the climate, these elements inform us about its evolution”, summarizes this research director at the CNRS. engineer, the researcher thus explores European and North African caves to collect stalagmites, veritable “climatic archives”. Only the already broken concretions are cut with a diamond saw so as not to “destroy the aesthetics” of the places, close that observed by the first h**o sapiens.In his laboratory in Bordeaux, armed with a dental drill, the scientist then “samples” the calcite dust on the stalagmites collected. He inserts it into a mass spectrometer to measure the abundance of carbon isotopes and decipher “the climatic signal”. A similar tool, measuring uranium and thorium, makes it possible to date the sample going back up to 500,000 years. evolution of the local monsoons for 640,000 years.- Nuclear tests -In Villars, the chronological analysis of the carbon 14 (C14) content – ​​a radioactive isotope of carbon – of the stalagmites made it possible to detect the impact of the peak of the nuclear tests carried out in the world during the Cold War.”The tests carried out at that time released a lot of C14 into the atmosphere”, which then infiltrated into living things, then, via rainwater, into underground stalagmites, according to the researchers. The peak of C14 measured in other caves of France, Slovenia and Belgium, intervenes each time in shift of several years after 1963, date of the treaty of Moscow which put an end to the nuclear tests in the atmosphere. This discovery “proves” that most of the carbon taken from the stalagmites was indeed the one previously present in the atmosphere and the vegetation, and serves as a “tracer” to better know the time of infiltration of water and carbon between the surface and the cave. It has made it possible to accredit the discipline, now in full swing with dozens of laboratories in Austria, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Australia, United States or China. With a longer dating, localized data, and a low shipping cost, research on cave “speleothems” completes the analysis of ice or marine cores, other memories of the climate, taken from the poles and the oceans.- Brutal changes -It reconstructs the major cycles in the history of the climate, between the glacial and interglacial periods, generated by the evolution of the parameters of the Earth’s orbit, and detects the abrupt variations within these cycles. “Technological progress” will allow also soon to “estimate the average temperatures” of distant times, bets Mr. Genty, by modeling a stalagmite in the cave in 3D, with a consumer application on his smartphone. To assess the current warming linked to human activity , the researcher has installed underground sensors since 1993, in order to measure the evolution of temperatures, water flow or CO2 content.35 meters underground, in an ultra-stable environment, the scientific duo updates the temperatures recorded on a laptop computer: 12.2°C against 11.1°C thirty years ago. An “enormous” increase in such a short time.”We have already experienced brutal changes” in the cycles of the past but “never such a rapid warming in an interglacial period”, as currently, observes Mr.

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NASA rover shares never-before-seen panoramas of Mars


The Rover Curiosity has just published a sublime image of Mars. This panorama is enough to make us want to visit the Red Planet as soon as possible.

The conquest of Mars is on the program. But it’s neither tomorrow nor the day after that the average person will be able to set foot on the Red Planet. While waiting for the first astronauts to settle, orbiters scan its surface while Rovers criss-cross some of its craters, searching for ancient traces of extraterrestrial life. Among these Rovers, there is in particular Curiosity, which regularly shares images of Martian landscapes with us. And his latest shot takes us on a journey.

The Rover Curiosity, this genius photographer

Curiosity is a real twitto. This robot, which has a selfie taken on Mars as a profile pic, regularly taunts us with its photos, which it posts frequently on Elon Musk’s social network.

Of course, this gives the most whimsical Internet users the opportunity to overinterpret any of his shots. We remember, for example, the story of the “alien door”, which set the Web on fire, or that of the “book” found on the Red Planet.

But today, it’s not about alien civilizations or literature. The Curiosity photo is just…pretty.

A panorama taken at two different times

The photo taken by Curiosity is a panorama, which has a small peculiarity: it is in fact a montage of two photos dated April 8, one taken in the morning at 9:20 a.m., the other in the afternoon at 3:40. The blue side represents morning, while the yellow side represents afternoon.

But why take such a shot? Mainly for aesthetic reasons, as NASA engineer Doug Ellison points out:

“Anyone who has ever been to a national park knows that the scenery is not the same in the morning as it is in the afternoon. (…) Shooting at two times of the day produces dark shadows because the lighting comes from the left and the right, like on a stage – but instead of stage lights, we rely on SamaGame.”