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Panich52

(5,829 posts)
Tue May 12, 2015, 12:04 PM May 2015

Time-lapse of Mars sunset

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover recorded this sequence of views of the sun setting at the close of the mission's 956th Martian day, or sol (April 15, 2015), from the rover's location in Gale Crater.

The four images shown in sequence here were taken over a span of 6 minutes, 51 seconds.

This was the first sunset observed in color by Curiosity. The images come from the left-eye camera of the rover's Mast Camera (Mastcam). The color has been calibrated and white-balanced to remove camera artifacts. Mastcam sees color very similarly to what human eyes see, although it is actually a little less sensitive to blue than people are.

Dust in the Martian atmosphere has fine particles that permit blue light to penetrate the atmosphere more efficiently than longer-wavelength colors. That causes the blue colors in the mixed light coming from the sun to stay closer to sun's part of the sky, compared to the wider scattering of yellow and red colors. The effect is most pronounced near sunset, when light from the sun passes through a longer path in the atmosphere than it does at mid-day.

Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, built and operates the rover's Mastcam. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed and built the project's Curiosity rover.

For more information about Curiosity, visit http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl.


NASA hotojournal
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA19401

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Time-lapse of Mars sunset (Original Post) Panich52 May 2015 OP
Here ya go. longship May 2015 #1
so cool. Terra Alta May 2015 #4
does Mars have stars? Cosmic Kitten May 2015 #2
does Mars have stars? AlbertCat May 2015 #3

Terra Alta

(5,158 posts)
4. so cool.
Tue May 12, 2015, 05:10 PM
May 2015

I hope sometime in my lifetime humans will make a visit to Mars. What a wonderful experience that would be.

 

AlbertCat

(17,505 posts)
3. does Mars have stars?
Tue May 12, 2015, 01:34 PM
May 2015

Well you can obviously see them in the night sky if that's what you mean. But a camera is not a eye, y'know, so it may not pick them up. But with a thin atmosphere, you should, were you standing on Mars, be able to see them better than here on Earth. Star's twinkle here on Earth because of distortion from our atmosphere.

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