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NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter just captured its first image of the Curiosity rover driving along the red planet’s surface.
The 2,000-pound Mars rover is shown as a dark speck in the bottom center of the picture frame. It leads a long, thin trail of its tracks that stretches 1,050 feet.
The space agency said in a statement that Curiosity’s tracks are likely to last there for months before the strong Martian wind erases them.
The line shows the progress Curiosity has made since it arrived on Mars in August of 2012.
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NASA’s Curiosity rover appears as a dark speck in this contrast-enhanced view taken in February. This image marks the first time the rover was captured driving by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)
The photo was taken using the orbiter’s High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, which snaps an image with the majority of the scene in black and white, and a strip of color down the middle to ensure the best spatial resolution.
“By comparing the time HiRISE took the image to the rover’s commands for the day, we can see it was nearly done with a 69-foot drive,” Doug Ellison, Curiosity’s planning team chief, noted in a statement.
Curiosity is seen moving toward the base of a steep slope, and has since ascended it.
The orbiter reached Mars orbit in March 2006. It snapped this scene on February 28, or the 4,466th Martian day of the rover’s mission.
While the camera has captured Curiosity in color before, the rover happened to fall within the black and white part of the image this time around.
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NASA’s Curiosity rover appears as a dark speck in this image captured from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The orbiter used its high-resolution camera (NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)
Earlier in the month, the rover began the first of roughly 11 drives, as it slowly trekked from the Gediz Vallis channel to its next stop.
The rover is heading to an area with potential boxwork formations, possibly made by ancient groundwater billions of years ago.
The boxwork pattern is a weblike form of ridges that were captured by NASA’s orbiter nearly 20 years ago.
When exactly Curiosity will get there depends on several factors, including how its software navigates the surface and how challenging the terrain is to climb. It’s expected, however, to reach the new science location within a month.
“Engineers at NASA’s Southern California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory work with scientists to plan each day’s trek,” NASA said.