Curiosity Rover Captures Asteroids in Martian Sky for First Time; LOOK at the Photo of Ceres and Vesta
ByNASA's Curiosity Mars rover has achieved another milestone, snapping a photo of asteroids in the sky over the Red Planet for the first time.
According to Space.com, Curiosity took the photo April 20 from its head's Mastcam during a session where it took images of Phobos and Deimos, Mars' two moons. During the series of photos, the rover captured the two brightest objects in the solar system's asteroid belt, Ceres and Vesta.
NASA said in a press release that a person with normal eyesight could see the two asteroids from Mars' surface.
"This imaging was part of an experiment checking the opacity of the atmosphere at night in Curiosity's location on Mars, where water-ice clouds and hazes develop during this season," camera team member Mark Lemmon, of Texas A&M University, said in the release. "The two Martian moons were the main targets that night, but we chose a time when one of the moons was near Ceres and Vesta in the sky."
Ceres and Vesta are much farther from the Earth than the objects that NASA is investigating for its asteroid initiative.
"That initiative includes two separate, but related activities: the asteroid redirect mission and the grand challenge," the space agency said in the release. "NASA is currently developing concepts for the redirect mission that will employ a robotic spacecraft, driven by an advanced solar electric propulsion system, to capture a small near-Earth asteroid or remove a boulder from the surface of a larger asteroid. The spacecraft then will attempt to redirect the object into a stable orbit around the moon."
As Curiosity continues to make landmark discoveries, Charles Bolden, NASA's chief, recently said Mars is the next great subject of exploration for the space agency.
"Everybody likes to talk about grand visions and stuff - but at some point, then, you've got to take the grand vision, and you've got to do little things to make that grand vision work," Bolden told Space.com. "And we're now at that point... We've talked enough about the grand vision. We're now talking real, gory details. People are now seeing the sausage made... let me put it that way."