14 DAY TRIAL // Mission controllers at American space agency have just released a new image collected by the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which centers on Gale Crater, and depicts the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover Curiosity happily trekking on the surface of the Red Planet.
The photo also shows some of the tracks the 1-ton, Mini Cooper-sized exploration robot has left behind since touching down in the massive crater on August 6, 2012. Curiosity is powered by a nuclear reactor, and is expected to endure on the surface of Mars for many years, controllers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) say.
The image was collected on December 11, 2013, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on MRO. The instrument is sensitive enough to make out the zig-zagging tracks that the rover left behind as it navigated towards or around rocks in the 154-kilometer (96-mile) crater.
MRO snapped its first image of Curiosity as the rover was descending through the Martian atmosphere, attached to its Sky Crane landing system. Since then, the orbiter has made periodic passes over Gale Crater, imaging the rover and documenting its movements from its Sun-synchronous orbit around our neighboring planet.