NASA's recently landed Perseverance rover?on Mars may be hogging the headlines, but the long-lived Curiosity rover is still having a great time out there on the Red Planet.
The gritty old wanderer looks sharp in a selfie taken with a beautiful Martian rock outcrop nicknamed "Mont Mercou" after a mountain in France.
Standing about 20 feet (6 meters) tall, the intriguing rock formation is captured in all its grandiose in the new selfie and a pair of panoramas that offer a 3D view.?
The Curiosity Mars rover used its drill to capture a sample of rock near the formation, which the scientists dubbed ¡®Nontron¡¯--the mission¡¯s 30th sample to date.
Researchers are particularly interested in this region since it represents a transition in the rocks from a clay-rich area to a sulfate-rich area, which might offer a clue as to what caused Mars to shift from a potentially habitable planet billions of years ago to the frozen desert we see today.
The Curiosity rover also glanced up to capture an image of clouds on Mars, taken using its right navigation camera. It looks breathtaking and eerily similar to the clouds seen here on Earth. And that got Twitter buzzing.
And then the NASA Mars Curiosity rover took it upon herself to answer those ¡®curious¡¯ folks who just seemed to have one question--and yes, that was about water in Mars' atmosphere.
Last week, Dr. Paul Byrne from North Carolina State University shared a stunning gif of Earth-like clouds on Mars, which was a set of eight images shot by Curiosity's navigation cameras, spanning a period of about five minutes.
Curiosity was the only active rover on Mars until the Perseverance touched the surface earlier this year on February 18. Both of them are located about 2,300 miles apart on Mars and are exploring very different areas.
Perseverance will search for signs of ancient microbial life in the dry lake bed and river delta of Jezero Crater while Curiosity has been steadily climbing the 3-mile-high Mount Sharp, located at the center of Gale Crater, since 2014.