NASA’s Mars orbiter snapped this image of Curiosity trucking along down at the surface
The Curiosity Mars rover covers a lot of ground for a robot that only moves at a max speed of .1 mph. A photo snapped recently by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provides a pretty cool visualization of what the rover has been up to so far this year, showing the tracks Curiosity left behind as it journeyed from its previous science target — an area called the Gediz Vallis channel — to its next destination. The rover itself is just a tiny speck at the front of the roughly 1,050-foot-long trail, and according to , this snap “is believed to be the first orbital image of the rover mid-drive across the Red Planet.”
The image was captured on February 28 by the orbiter’s HiRISE (High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera, and shows Curiosity’s movement over 11 drives starting at the beginning of that month. While a few weeks might seem like a long time for tire tracks to stick around in the dirt, this is normal for Mars. The tracks are “[l]ikely to last for months before being erased by wind,” NASA says. Curiosity is expected to reach its next science destination, which is home to formations thought to have been created long ago by groundwater, in the coming weeks.
