NASA Shares Panoramic Postcard Capturing Morning And Afternoon Views From Mars

The US space agency NASA released a spectacular panoramic view on Tuesday capturing both the morning and afternoon views of Mars.

The pictures were taken as the rover ascended the foothills of the 3-mile-high (5-kilometre-high) mountain with the Gale Crater, according to NASA.

The Mars rover captured the image by using its black-and-white navigation cameras to take two series of five individual images captured over 7 1/2 minutes -- one series in the morning and one in the afternoon of April 8, 2023, NASA explained.

The first image was captured on April 8, 2023, at 9:20 am, while the second image was clicked at 3:40 pm local Mars time.

"Anyone who's been to a national park knows the scene looks different in the morning than it does in the afternoon," said Curiosity engineer Doug Ellison of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, who planned and processed the images. "Capturing two times of day provides dark shadows because the lighting is coming in from the left and the right like you might have on a stage - but instead of stage lights, we're relying on the Sun."

Adding to the depth of the shadows is the fact that it was winter - a period of lower airborne dust - at Curiosity's location when the images were taken. "Mars' shadows get sharper and deeper when there's low dust and softer when there's lots of dust," Ellison added.

The image peers past the rear of the rover, providing a glimpse of its three antennas and a nuclear power source. The Radiation Assessment Detector, or RAD, instrument, which appears as a white circle in the lower right of the image, has been helping scientists learn how to protect the first astronauts sent to Mars from radiation on the planet's surface.