Mars fans dream of a day when astronauts land on the red planet and, perhaps, even stay for a while. Until then, humanity’s robotic emissaries are our eyes on Mars. You can’t visit Mars in person (yet), but you can get an idea of what a typical day looks like with a pair of stunning videos from NASA’s Curiosity rover.
NASA released the dawn-to-dusk footage in late December, but the videos come from November 8 when the rover was parked for solar conjunction. Solar conjunction is a time of quiet for Mars machines thanks to the sun being between Earth and the red planet. NASA’s teams lay off radio communications during conjunction due to the potential for communications interference.
Prior to conjunction, the Curiosity team sent commands to Curiosity to use its hazard-avoidance cameras (called Hazcams) to record 12 hours of photos. The aim was to try to capture dust devils or cloud activity. Those weather formations didn’t materialize, but the rover did manage to document a full glorious day on Mars—a first for Curiosity.
NASA released two videos, one from the front Hazcam and one from the back. The black-and-white images show a haunting, rocky landscape as the rover’s shadow moves across the surface like a sundial. The rover is exploring the side of Mount Sharp, a large central mountain in the Gale Crater.
In the front Hazcam video, there’s a moment when the view is dotted with white specks. That’s due to the camera’s exposure time. “In the middle of the day, the front Hazcam’s autoexposure algorithm settles on exposure times of around one-third of a second,” NASA explained in a statement. “By nightfall, that exposure time grows to more than a minute, causing the typical sensor noise known as ‘hot pixels’ that appears as white snow across the final image.”
There are some more surreal moments in the rear Hazcam video. A small black object appears to the left and then is gone in a flash. It’s not a UFO. It was caused by a cosmic ray reaching the camera sensor and creating an artifact. “Likewise, the bright flashing and other noise at the end of the video are the result of heat from the spacecraft’s power system affecting the Hazcam’s image sensor,” said NASA.
NASA also explained the speckled look of the images. That’s what over a decade of Martian dust will do to a camera lens. Curiosity arrived on Mars in 2012 on a mission to understand whether or not the Gale Crater might have been able to support microbial life in the past. The long-lived rover continues to traverse the landscape and send back valuable science data, including evidence of long-ago lakes and organic molecules.
Curiosity is about much more than cold, hard data. It’s a window into another world, one that humans are considering for future colonization. You can put yourself into the rover’s shoes (or wheels) and imagine standing on the surface of Mars, watching the shadows creep across the landscape. There are no trees, no birds, no fluffy clouds filling the sky. It might make you think twice about living on Mars, or it might make you feel a pull to a distant planet that is both familiar and strange.
Shambhu Kumar is a science communicator, making complex scientific topics accessible to all. His articles explore breakthroughs in various scientific disciplines, from space exploration to cutting-edge research.
