Some of the Best Photos NASA’s Curiosity Rover Has Taken in Its 8 Years on Mars

NASA’s Curiosity landed on Mars on August 6, 2012 – if you remember, you could even sort of livestream its Martian landing. It became the only functional robot on the planet after NASA’s Opportunity stopped communicating on February 13, 2019.

After nearly 8 years of service, the Curiosity has taken some amazing pictures of the Red Planet (and it’s still trundling around doing it’s thing). You can check out the thousands of images on NASA’s official website.

In the meantime, here’s a quick preview of the beauty of Mars.

15. Curiosity Selfie!

Even robots want to take a picture now and then.

14. A Petrified Area

These patterns are just beautiful.

13. Check out These Gorgeous Views

Worthy of a museum exhibit!

12. Checking out Its Own Wheel Track

It’s a meta portrait.

11. An Active Sand Dune

Called Gobabeb, this sand dune belongs to a dune field called Bagnold.

10. Mount Sharp’s Base

This is mudstone.

9. Yet Another Shot of Mount Sharp

These sedimentary rocks are still charming to look at.

8. A Wide Shot

Actually taken from a Mars Orbiter, not by Curiosity.

7. Fracture Shot

This has many rocks that look as if they’ve been, well, fractured.

6. A Rocky Dreamscape

It looks like a dream!

5. Wide-Shot of Mount Sharp

This far-off view definitely speaks for itself!

4. The Bottom of Mount Sharp

There are many great angles of this mountain.

3. Take a Gander at This!

It’s called Jake Matijevic Rock.

2. The “Harrison” Rock

There are some crystals in this shot too!

1. Martian Sunset

If it looks other-worldly, that’s because it is!

As of now, the Curiosity is still doing strong on Mars.

If you’ve got thoughts, we totally look forward to hearing anything you have to say about these landscapes. All scientific facts, discussion, and theories are totally welcome in the comments.

The post Some of the Best Photos NASA’s Curiosity Rover Has Taken in Its 8 Years on Mars appeared first on UberFacts.

The Curiosity Rover Found Oxygen Behavior on Mars That Is Baffling Scientists

The Curiosity rover has been in Mars’ Gale Crater in 2012, and since then, has been studying all things Martian, so we can know more about the planet’s past.

Well, what we now know, more than anything, is how much we don’t understand about what’s happening out there.

Case in point: the rover’s tunable laser spectrometer (or Sample Analysis at Mars, SAM) recently found a huge amount of methane–the largest since landing there.

Photo Credit: NASA

Followed closely by the discovery that oxygen is behaving in a way scientists don’t quite understand.

In the past six years, SAM has determined the following about the atmosphere of Mars: 95 percent is carbon dioxide, 2.6 percent molecular nitrogen, 1.9 percent argon, 0.16 percent oxygen and 0.06 percent carbon monoxide.

Mars has seasons sort of like Earth, but they happen because the air pressure changes when carbon dioxide gas freezes at the poles during winter. This event causes the air pressure to lower. When the carbon dioxide eventually evaporates and is redistributed into the atmosphere, the air pressure rises for a Mars spring and summer.

Photo Credit: NASA

Nitrogen and argon followed a similar pattern.

Oxygen, however, didn’t.

It actually rose and peaked at 30 percent during spring and summer, then lowered to normal levels in fall.

Photo Credit: NASA

This pattern has repeated itself since Curiosity started monitoring. The only difference was that the levels of oxygen rising and falling varied.

Is the oxygen being created by something? What’s causing it to fall?

According to CNN, one of the authors of a new paper covering the seasonal variations, Sushil Atreya, said the data was “mind boggling.”

Photo Credit: NASA

The scientists involved in the study were so puzzled they even had the rover checked out for operational issues. But Curiosity was working as usual.

Melissa Trainer, study author and planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said:

We’re struggling to explain this. The fact that the oxygen behavior isn’t perfectly repeatable every season makes us think that it’s not an issue that has to do with atmospheric dynamics. It has to be some chemical source and sink (of elements into the soil) that we can’t yet account for.

So, what about the huge amount of methane?

The Tunable Laser Spectrometer on NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover
Photo Credit: NASA

On Earth, most of our methane is created by living things, but also by rocks and water. Mars has plenty of rocks and water.

Principal Investigator Paul Mahaffy of NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, noted that current measurement systems cannot determine the exact source of methane. What they do know, however, is that the methane fluctuates with the seasons as widely as oxygen.

Could the strange behavior of the two gases be related somehow?

Atreya believes so, although no one can figure out how.

In the meantime, the team invites any and all Martian experts to chime in.

The post The Curiosity Rover Found Oxygen Behavior on Mars That Is Baffling Scientists appeared first on UberFacts.