Mount Sharp On Mars Seen From Curiosity Rover (Photo)

A new panorama photo from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity was released, showing the towering Mount Sharp which will be climbed by the rover in a few weeks. The panorama was assembled in mosaic fashion from many images taken by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on the rover, and edited in a white-balanced color adjustment that makes the sky look overly blue but shows the terrain as if under Earth-like lighting. White-balancing helps scientists recognize rock materials based on their experience looking at rocks on Earth. The Martian sky would look more of a butterscotch color to the human eye. White balancing yields an overly blue hue in images that have very little blue information, such as Martian landscapes, because the white balancing tends to overcompensate for the low inherent blue content.

Mount Sharp, also called Aeolis Mons, is a layered mound in the center of Mars' Gale Crater, rising more than 5 kilometers above the crater floor, where Curiosity has been working since the rover's landing in August 2012. Lower slopes of Mount Sharp are the major destination for the mission, though the rover will first spend many more weeks around a location called "Yellowknife Bay," where it has found evidence of a past environment favorable for microbial life in a major breakthrough and the most important exoplanetary discovery in the history of mankind.

The mosaic, assembled from dozens of images from the 100-millimeter-focal-length telephoto lens camera mounted on the right side of the Mastcam instrument, were taken during the 45th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's mission on Mars (Sept. 20, 2012). The sky has been filled out by extrapolating color and brightness information from the portions of the sky that were captured in images of the terrain.

A raw-color version of the mosaic is available at https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA16769. Raw color shows the scene's colors as they would look in a typical smart-phone camera photo.