Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

The Sun dips to a Martian horizon in a blue-tinged sky in images sent home to Earth last week from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has recorded a sequence of views of the Sun setting at Gale Crater.Using its Mast Camera (Mastcam), the robot recorded the sunset during an evening of skywatching on April 15, 2015 – at the close of the mission’s 956th Martian day, or sol. They were transmitted back to Earth last week from the Mars machinery.

The imaging was done between dust storms. Some dust remained suspended high in the atmosphere. The sunset observations help researchers assess the vertical distribution of dust in the thin Martian atmosphere.

A series of images is combined into an animation at:

http://mars.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/?ImageID=7188

For a single-frame scenic view, go to:

http://mars.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/?ImageID=7189

Wheel slip

Curiosity image taken by Front Hazcam Left B on May 9, Sol 979.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Meanwhile, in a mission update from the USGS Astrogeology Science Center’s Ryan Anderson, Curiosity recently was stopped on its Sol 978 drive after going only a couple meters instead of the expected roughly 60 feet (19 meters).The reason was that the rover detected that its wheels were slipping in the sand.

“Curiosity currently is in no danger of getting stuck,” Anderson reports, and the weekend plan is to back up slightly and drive around the worst of the sand.

Anderson is a planetary scientist at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center and a member of Curiosity’s ChemCam team.

Curiosity Mastcam image of Martian landscape, taken May 7, Sol 978.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS