NASA’s Curiosity rover takes a stunning selfie as Perseverance approaches – BGR

• NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover has been exploring the Red Planet for most of the decade and is still doing a great job.
• The rover recently took a short break from collecting and analyzing samples to take a selfie.
• The Perseverance rover is expected to land on Mars in February 2021.

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All eyes are on NASA’s Mars 2020 mission taking the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter to the Red Planet. Mars 2020’s new tools and hardware capabilities will be crucial in revealing new details about our dusty orange neighbor, but there is already a rover on Mars and it continues to do a great job even after more than eight years around. planet.

Curiosity, the nuclear-powered rover that arrived on Mars in mid-2012 is still going strong. He is currently investigating a new site on the planet and taking an occasional sample, but his handlers at NASA have decided to take a moment and snap a quick selfie of the robot.

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As NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains in a new blog post, Curiosity is currently touring an area of ​​Mars known as Mary Anning. He has been investigating the area since July and is using his drill – which has been out of order for some time – to capture some rock samples, analyze them, and then send the data back to Earth.

According to JPL, there is a lot of data to look into, but the team is already planning Curiosity’s next moves. “It will take months for the team to interpret the chemistry and minerals in the samples from the Mary Anning site,” explains NASA. Meanwhile, the scientists and engineers who commanded the rover from their homes as a safety precaution during the coronavirus pandemic have ordered Curiosity to continue its ascent of Mount Sharp. The rover’s next exploration target is a sulfate-laden rock layer higher up the mountain. The team hopes to reach it at the beginning of 2021 “.

Meanwhile, the Perseverance rover is now within 100 days of its scheduled landing on Mars. The rover will land at a significant distance from Curiosity in the Jezero Crater. The crater was chosen because researchers believe it may have once been the site of an ancient lake and this could mean that the soil and surface material still retain traces of ancient life. The new rover will take and analyze samples but also prepare them for return to Earth in the years to come. The samples will be secured and sealed and, on a future mission, will be collected and launched into orbit where a separate spacecraft will grab them and bring them back to Earth.