African desert? No, the surface of Mars!
YOU might expect a Bedouin tribe to wander across this scene with their camels.
But the eerie landscape is much farther from home than the Sahara.
The view is actually around 60million miles away – or an eight-month rocket trip – on the surface of Mars.
The image of the Red Planet, taken by Nasa’s Curiosity Mars rover, has been digitally ‘white-balanced’ so the rocks appear as they would under our sky.
The mountain ridge in the background is 50 miles from the rover’s camera – which took 16 pictures shortly before northern Mars’s winter solstice, when clear skies provide a sharp view of distant scenery. Stitched together, the photos form a panorama that takes in Yellowknife Bay – where in 2013 the space mission found evidence of an ancient freshwater lake, with all the basic chemical ingredients for alien microbial life.
Uphill to the south is the Clay Unit, which is the mission’s next destination after observations from orbit detected clay minerals there.
The site from which the images were taken three months ago sits 1,073ft above the landing spot on the floor of Gale Crater where the rover touched down in 2012. Ashwin Vasavada, of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said: ‘Even though Curiosity has been steadily climbing for five years, this is the first time we could look back and see the whole mission laid out below us.
‘From our perch on Vera Rubin Ridge, the vast plains of the crater floor stretch out to the spectacular mountain range that forms the northern rim of Gale Crater.’
The ridge, named after the astronomer who helped find evidence of dark matter, encompasses much of the 11-mile route the rover has taken so far. Its next task is to drill for powdered rock samples.