A panoramic photo was the only way to go. I wanted the details in the mountains while maintaining a sense of the vast landscape. They turned into a jagged saw blade of color in a frame dominated by sky and water. Shooting wide at 14mm, the mountain range shrank to a small part of the frame. It was late evening and the alpenglow was lighting up the mountains across the bay in bright peach light. Last winter, I was photographing along a gravel beach near Haines, Alaska. ItвЂ™s too big, the scenery too grand to isolate down into a single frame. The wheels are holding up well, providing the traction we need to continue our climb.Even four or five images donвЂ™t do the Alaskan landscape justice sometimes. Due to recent trends, it seems unlikely that we would need to take such action. 'If we ever reached the point that a single wheel had broken a majority of its grousers, we could do a controlled break to shed the pieces that are left. 'We have proven through ground testing that we can safely drive on the wheel rims if necessary,' said Megan Lin, Curiosity's project manager at JPL. A traction control algorithm had slowed wheel wear enough to justify increasing the distance between imaging. The team has decided to increase its wheel imaging to every 1,640 feet (500 meters)-a return to the original cadence. The previously damaged grousers attracted attention online recently because some of the metal 'skin' between them appears to have fallen out of the wheel in the past few months, leaving a gap. NASAвЂ™s Curiosity Mars rover captured evidence of layers that built up as windblown sand both accumulated and was scoured away at a location nicknamed вЂњLas Claritas.вЂќ This image was captured using CuriosityвЂ™s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, on May 19, 2022, the 3,478th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. This particular wheel already had four broken grousers, so now five of its 19 grousers are broken. The team discovered that the left middle wheel had damaged one of its grousers, the zig-zagging treads along Curiosity's wheels. On June 4, the engineering team commanded Curiosity to take new pictures of its wheels-something it had been doing every 3,281 feet (1,000 meters) to check their overall health. The rover's aluminum wheels are also showing signs of wear.

They suspect safe mode was triggered after a temperature sensor provided an inaccurate measurement, and there's no sign it will significantly affect rover operations since backup temperature sensors can ensure the electronics within the rover body aren't getting too hot. Safe mode occurs when a spacecraft senses an issue and automatically shuts down all but its most essential functions so that engineers can assess the situation.ДЄlthough Curiosity exited safe mode and returned to normal operations two days later, JPL's engineers are still analyzing the exact cause of the issue. On June 7, Curiosity went into safe mode after detecting a temperature reading on an instrument control box within the body of the rover that was warmer than expected. The panorama is made up of 133 individual images captured by Curiosity's Mast Camera, or Mastcam. NASA's Curiosity Mars rover captured this 360-degree panorama near a location nicknamed Sierra Maigualida on May 22, 2022. Curiosity will soon drill the last rock sample it will take in this zone, providing a more detailed glimpse into the changing mineral composition of these rocks. That's a big change from the lakes that persisted for perhaps millions of years before.'ДЄs the rover climbs higher through the transition zone, it is detecting less clay and more sulfate. 'Instead, we see lots of evidence of drier climates, like dry dunes that occasionally had streams running around them. 'We no longer see the lake deposits that we saw for years lower on Mount Sharp,' said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Higher on the mountain in the transition zone, Curiosity's observations show that the streams dried into trickles and sand dunes formed above the lake sediments. The clay minerals formed when lakes and streams once rippled across Gale Crater, depositing sediment at what is now the base of Mount Sharp, the 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain whose foothills Curiosity has been ascending since 2014.

Free landscape panorama video