Since August 2012, the rover NASA Curiosities is exploring Mars. Although somewhat overshadowed by the novel Perseverance, he continues to send important information about the surface of the red planet.
The most recent, an image shared by the North American aerospace agency in which users highlighted something: a “duck”.
Yes, It’s a duck-shaped rock a curiosity obtained by Curiosity. Easy joke.
It happened on October 20, the 3,628th Martian day of the mission. The Curiosity rover captured with its Mast Camera (Mastcam) the image of the rocks with particular shapes.
The photograph, originally in black and white, is available on NASA’s Mars Exploration Program web gallery.
Andrea Luk, a citizen scientist who contributes material about space, showed the image on his Twitter account: “This is a duck-shaped rock discovered on Mars a few days ago in SOL 3628 (10/22) by NASA’s Curiosity rover” .
He also left the link to see the photo in full size.
NASA’s Curiosity work on the planet Mars
The Curiosity rover was launched by NASA on November 26, 2011, reaching the surface of Mars on August 6, 2012. It is a huge 899 kilogram exploration vehicle, whose objective is to take samples of soil and rock dust for analysis by agency scientists from Earth.
Although the expected duration of the mission was one Martian year, it is still operational, ten years later.
Until August 2020, it had traveled more than 23 kilometers, in search of signs of past life on the red planet. In addition to having the MastCam, it has the MAHLI, MARDI, Hazcams and Navcams, as well as spectrometers, radiation detectors and environmental sensors, along with a robotic arm.