On Mars while stargazing, Curiosity meanderer spots Earth and Venus

NASA’s Curiosity Mars meanderer every so often stops to stargaze. As of late, it caught a fix of Earth and Venus in the Red Planet’s night sky.

Interest pointed its Mast Camera, or Mastcam, at the sky around 75 minutes after dusk on June 5, 2020, the 2,784th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. A two-picture nightfall scene uncovers Earth in one casing and Venus in the other. The two planets show up as simple pinpoints of light, inferable from a mix of separation and residue noticeable all around; they would regularly look like brilliant stars.

The short photograph meeting was incompletely to check the dusk brilliance: During this season on Mars, there’s more residue noticeable all around to reflect daylight, making it especially splendid, said Mastcam co-examiner Mark Lemmon of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

“Even moderately bright stars were not visible when this image of Venus was taken,” Lemmon said. “Earth also has bright twilights after some large volcanic eruptions.”

At the point when Curiosity’s Mastcam imaged Earth and its Moon in 2014, the shading and brilliance of the sky were fundamentally unique in relation to from these latest pictures on account of all the high-elevation dust in the Martian air at this moment.

At the base of the new pictures is the highest point of a stone component called Tower Butte in the “clay-bearing unit,” which Curiosity has been investigating for over a year. Since arriving in 2012, the meanderer has caught blue Martian nightfalls and passing space rocks just as Mercury and Mars’ two moons, Phobos and Deimos, traveling over the Sun.