NASA's Curiosity Beams Back a Color 360 of Gale Crater

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 PHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

DC Agle / Guy Webster 818-393-9011/818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
agle@jpl.nasa.gov / guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

News release: 2012-237 Aug. 9, 2012

NASA's Curiosity Beams Back A Color 360 Of Gale Crater

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-237&cid=release_2012-237

PASADENA, Calif. – The first images from Curiosity's color Mast Camera, or Mastcam, have been
received by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The 130 low-
resolution thumbnails, which were received Thursday morning, provide scientists and engineers of
NASA's newest Mars rover their first color, horizon-to-horizon glimpse of Gale Crater.

"After a year in cold storage, where it endured the rigors of launch, the deep space cruise to Mars and
everything that went on during landing, it is great to see our camera is working as planned," said
Mike Malin, principal investigator of the Mastcam instrument from Malin Space Science Systems in
San Diego. "As engaging as this color panorama is, it is important to note this is only one-eighth the
potential resolution of images from this camera."

The Curiosity team also continued to downlink high-resolution black-and-white images from its
Navigation Camera, or Navcam. These individual images have been stitched together to provide a
high-resolution Navcam panorama, including a glimpse of the rover's deck. Evident on some portions
of the deck are some small Martian pebbles.

"The latest Navcam images show us that the rocket engines on our descent stage kicked up some
material from the surface of Mars, several pieces which ended up on our rover's deck," said Mike
Watkins, mission manager for Curiosity from JPL. "These small pebbles we currently see are up to
about 1 centimeter [0.4 inch] in size and should pose no problems for mission operations. It will be
interesting to see how long our hitchhikers stick around."

Curiosity's color panorama of Gale Crater is online at: http://1.usa.gov/P7VsUw . Additional images
from Curiosity are available at: http://1.usa.gov/MfiyD0 .

Mission engineers devoted part of their third Martian day, or "Sol 3," to checking the status of four of
Curiosity's science instruments after their long trip. The rover's Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer,
Chemistry and Mineralogy analyzer, Sample Analysis at Mars, and Dynamic of Albedo Neutrons
instruments were each energized and went through a preliminary checkout. The team also performed
a check on the rover's second flight computer.

Even before landing, the mission's science team began the process of creating a geological map of
about 150 square miles (about 390 square kilometers) within Gale Crater that includes the landing
area.

"It is important to understand the geological context around Curiosity," said Dawn Sumner of the
University of California, Davis, a member of the Curiosity science team. "We want to choose a route
to Mount Sharp that makes good progress toward the destination while allowing important science
observations along the way."

The mapping project divided the area into 151 quadrangles of about one square mile (about 2.6
square kilometers) each. Curiosity landed in the quadrangle called Yellowknife. Yellowknife is the
city in northern Canada that was the starting point for many of the great geological expeditions to
map the oldest rocks in North America.

Curiosity carries 10 science instruments with a total mass 15 times as large as the science payloads on
NASA's Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Some of the tools, such as a laser-firing instrument for
checking rocks' elemental composition from a distance, are the first of their kind on Mars. Curiosity
will use a drill and scoop, which are located at the end of its robotic arm, to gather soil and powdered
samples of rock interiors, then sieve and parcel out these samples into the rover's analytical
laboratory instruments.

To handle this science toolkit, Curiosity is twice as long and five times as heavy as Spirit or
Opportunity. The Gale Crater landing site places the rover within driving distance of layers of the
crater's interior mountain. Observations from orbit have identified clay and sulfate minerals in the
lower layers, indicating a wet history.

The Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity mission is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, Calif., a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

For more about NASA's Curiosity mission, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/msl
http://www.nasa.gov/mars and http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl .

Follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at: http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity
and http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .

-end-


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