A satellite zooming around Mars spotted a lone machine, the Curiosity Rover, exploring the rugged Martian terrain.
The car-sized rover, which has traveled almost 13 miles on Mars over the last seven years, is now carefully inching up the base of Mount Sharp, a 3.5-mile tall mountain sitting in the middle of the sprawling Gale Crater. The rover has been busy scouring rock samples in an area that planetary scientists suspect was once blanketed in wet clay.
“It’s just one of many stops the rover has made in an area referred to as the “clay-bearing unit” on the side of Mount Sharp,” NASA wrote on Friday. Read more…
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