WASHINGTON, July 24 (RIA Novosti) – It looks like a robot, moves like a car, and takes on challenging tasks like a company employee of the year. Now NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has taken its achievements to a whole new level.
This week Curiosity traveled further than a US football field in one day for the first time since its mission on Mars began almost a year ago.
It journeyed 109.7 yards (100.3 meters) on Sunday, the 340th Martian day, or sol, of its mission, NASA announced. That’s roughly twice as far as it had traveled since the mission started at Gale Crater last August.
The day began at a vantage point on the Mars landscape which gave rover engineers an unusually good view of the surrounding terrain, NASA said. They also used images from the telephoto-lens Mast Camera.
"What enabled us to drive so far on Sol 340 was starting at a high point and also having Mastcam images giving us the size of rocks so we could be sure they were not hazards," said rover planner Paolo Bellutta of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California in a statement.
“We could see for quite a distance, but there was an area straight ahead that was not clearly visible, so we had to find a path around that area," he added.
Curiosity also has new software that allows it to record images that more accurately gauge the distance to a particular point, based on a range of temperature readings.
The previous one-day rover record for this mission was roughly 54 yards (49 meters) on Sept. 26, 2012. On Tuesday Curiosity bypassed that earlier record once again, traveling 68.2 yards (62.4 meters).
When it reaches its destination – Mount Sharp, in the middle of Gale Crater – scientists hope to locate evidence about how the ancient Martian environment evolved.
