Murray Buttes has been named after the former director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Bruce C. Murray while the footage shows a dark Mesa just left of the Curiosity’s robotic arm – a feature that stands about 50 feet high and is about 300 feet away from rover’s eye view.
Advertisement
The rover captured the image using its Mastcam on August 5, four years since it began its mission on the planet.
The buttes are eroded sandstone formations that sit on top of lower Mount Sharp (the distant bump on the left-side of the image is upper Mount Sharp).
The structures are capped with rock that is resistant to wind erosion, according to NASA. All of them were snapped from the rover’s position during the afternoon of the mission’s 1,421st sol (Martian day), which was also the fourth anniversary of Curiosity’s landing on Mars.
A key goal is to learn how freshwater lake conditions, which would have been favourable for microbes billions of years ago if Mars has ever had life, evolved into harsher, arid conditions much less suited to supporting life.
The Curiosity Rover serves the primary objective of examining soil samples on the planet in search for new discoveries of water or life on the scorched terrain of the planet. JPL manages the Curiosity mission for NASA. Players can drive a rover through the rough Martian terrain and challenge themselves to navigate and balance the rover in order to earn points.
Advertisement
The image was captured by NASA’s Curiosity rover with its Mast Camera (Mastcam) to capture dozens of component images of this scene on August 5 this year four years after landing inside Gale Crater, the U.S. space agency said in a statement on Friday.
