NASA Mars Rover Captures Ethereal Clouds Wandering Across the Sky
Enjoy an Earth-like moment as seen by the Curiosity rover on Mars.
If you paused at some moment this week to gaze up at the clouds, then you have something in common with NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars. The rover went skygazing in the Gale Crater and spotted some ethereal clouds passing by.
Image processor extraordinaire Kevin Gill, also a "Martian photographer" with NASA-JPL, put together a gif of thin clouds passing above a distant rock formation on Sept. 13.
Thin clouds over Gale Crater on Mars. Taken by the Curiosity Rover on sol 3592 (yestersol) pic.twitter.com/1sVW21bz2X
— Kevin M. Gill (@kevinmgill) September 14, 2022
Gill massaged the original raw images to help the clouds stand out. Gill emphasized how thin the clouds are, tweeting, "They're taken with a low sun angle to maximize their visibility and I ran a pretty strong stretch on them to make them this visible."
Mars doesn't have the big puffy, fluffy clouds that look like sheep and dragons on Earth, but its cloud formations have a quiet beauty all their own. Check out these glistening "mother of pearl" clouds spotted by Curiosity in 2021. While Mars has clouds made of water like we do on Earth, scientists are also considering that it may have clouds formed from dry ice, frozen carbon dioxide.
Curiosity has spent more than 10 years on Mars, braving tough conditions that have damaged its wheels. Its continued operation shows the resilience of the equipment and of the team that operates it. Perhaps what's most remarkable is that a machine on another planet looked up at an alien sky and, barely a day later, us humans on Earth could witness its vision.