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Sol 4416-4417: New Year, New Clouds
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity used its light navigation camera to image noctilucent clouds on Sol 4401, Mars Day 4,401 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission, on December 23, 2024 at 08:57:15 UTC. I took a photo. NASA/JPL-California Institute of Technology
Earth Plan Day: Monday, January 6, 2025
After the marathon vacation plan, we’ll ring in the new year with a standard 2-sol plan. We got the news today that the drive didn’t get as far as we had hoped, but luckily the rover’s planners have two winter targets: Snow Creek and We decided that we were still in a good position to do contact science in “. Winter Creek. ” It also packs in a lot of remote science with ChemCam using the “Grapevine” and “Skull Rock” LIBS, and long-range imaging of the Texoli and Wilkerson buttes and Gould Mesa. The mast camera photographs many targets near and far, including ‘Red Box’, ‘Point Mugu’, ‘Stone Canyon’, ‘Pine Cove’ and ‘Hummingbird Sage’, inspecting various structures within the bedrock. I will. Don’t forget about the atmosphere. We do some dust research to look for dust removal, but the real star of the show (at least for me) is the cloud imaging.
2025 has just begun here on Earth, but the new year is just around the corner on Mars. The Martian year begins at the northern equinox (the beginning of fall in the southern hemisphere, where Curiosity is located), and Martian year 38 begins on November 12th.
Autumn on Mars is now about a third of the way through, and clouds appear in autumn and winter south of Mars. Near the beginning of the Martian year, clouds begin to appear around sunset. These are noctilucent (meaning “illuminated at night”) clouds. Even though the sun has set in Gale Crater, the clouds are high enough in the atmosphere that the sun is still shining so it looks like it’s shining in the sky. This can also be seen in clouds on Earth around dusk. Mars Year 38 will be my fourth year photographing these dusk clouds. Navcam images (one of which is shown above) are already showing that this is shaping up to be another year of great clouds.
Written by Alex Inanen, atmospheric scientist at York University
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Last updated date
January 8, 2025
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