The Gediz Vallis channel is visible above the rocky area in the foreground.
Mars is a dry and dusty planet these days, but it wasn’t always like that. NASA’s Mars rovers are getting an up close and personal look at the red planet’s enigmatic history of water. You can drop yourself right into the middle of this mystery with a dramatic 360-degree panorama from NASA’s Curiosity Rover. The view shows the intriguing Gediz Vallis channel, which may have once been home to a river.
Curiosity is in residence at the Gale Crater where it’s been working its way up the base of the crater’s massive central mountain, Mount Sharp. The Gediz Vallis channel was one of the last features to form on the imposing mountain.
The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory released a 360-degree image on YouTube on March 29 that allows you to move around within the view. Annotations point out landmarks like the Gale Crater rim, nearby buttes and the debris pile that fills the Gediz Vallis channel. The channel is a highlight of the panorama. “From space, it looks like a river channel. That’s what attracted scientists’ attention initially,” says NASA JPL spokesperson Andrew Good over email.
The video panorama is made from 10 images captured on February 1 by a navigation camera located on the rover’s mast, the part of the machine that looks like its head.
Scientists are working to understand when liquid water vanished from the surface of Mars. Curiosity’s study of Gediz Vallis could add valuable data to that discussion. “The rover team is searching for evidence that would confirm how the channel was carved into the underlying bedrock,” said NASA in a statement. “The formation’s sides are steep enough that the team doesn’t think the channel was made by wind.” The channel could be explained by the long-ago presence of a river carving the land with water full of rocks and sediment. The channel is now packed with boulders and debris that likely came from higher up on Mount Sharp.
Curiosity’s continued explorations could help settle the question of how Gediz Vallis formed. It may also change our understanding of the Gale Crater. “If the channel or the debris pile were formed by liquid water, that’s really interesting,” said Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA JPL. “It would mean that fairly late in the story of Mount Sharp—after a long dry period—water came back, and in a big way.”
The rover has found evidence of cyclical wet and dry periods in the crater, a revelation NASA referred to as “one of the most surprising discoveries Curiosity has made while driving up Mount Sharp.” Liquid water didn’t just slowly dry up over time. It went through boom and bust cycles.
The landscape features are the star of the panorama, but there’s something else special going on here. You can see a lot of Curiosity. “What I particularly like about it is the rare chance to look at the rover’s deck,” says Good. “Usually that’s left out of Mastcam images to reduce the amount of data required in each panorama.” Annotations point out the rover’s nuclear power source, sundial, radiation detector, drill and rock-sample ports.
Curiosity has been in residence on Mars since 2012 and it’s still going strong. That’s a remarkable run considering the challenges of being a rolling machine on Mars. It’s a rocky place with extreme weather and nasty dust storms. The rover’s longevity is paying off in glorious panoramas and new insights into the planet’s history.
