NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover has returned a stunning “postcard” for the morning and afternoon

NASA’s Curiosity rover has been exploring the surface of Mars for more than a decade – traversing the unexplored Earth in earnest to collect soil, rock and air samples for researchers on the ground. Occasionally, she dabbles in her other hobby: Martian photography.

A perfect example of this is one of his most recent images, showing stunning sunrises and blue noon skies simultaneously on Mars. Curiosity took an image of the Marker Band’s valley before it left the region to head to other parts of the Red Planet. The new image is indeed a composite taken on April 8 at 9:20 AM and 3:40 PM Martian local time, and it depicts amazing detail and remarkable contrast in lighting between the two periods of the day.

Here is the morning photo:

Here’s an afternoon shot:

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Put them together, add a splash of color, and you get the picture above!

While the visuals are certainly captivating, the image was originally in black and white – with coloring added later by an Earthbound artist. The blues in the image help the yellow of the rising sun to appear on the left side of the image. Meanwhile, two rocky hills—Bolivar and Dipdil—rise dramatically in the center right of the image.

Eagle-eyed viewers can also see the tracks left by the SUV-sized rover embedded in the Martian soil.

“Twice-a-day capture provides dark shadows because the lighting comes in from the left and right, as it might on a stage, but instead of stage lights, we’re relying on the sun,” Curiosity engineer Doug Ellison, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement.

In a press release, JPL referred to the photo as “PostcardFrom the 12-year-old Mars rover, which captured the image using its black and white navigation cameras after completing a major software update in April. It took similar picture From the top of the three-mile-high Mount Sharp on Mars in November 2021.

Currently, Curiosity is on a slow and steady journey up a valley toward a group of craters above. The trip offers NASA researchers plenty of opportunities to make observations much like its latest postcard to expand our images and views of the Martian surface—that is, until we can get there and do it ourselves.

However, for now, we’re in good hands with the eye candy Curiosity is still churning out.