As NASA has been shuttered by the insane U.S. government shutdown, there’s been little in the way of news releases from NASA (site offline) or NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (site still online, but no recent updates posted). In this Mars Science Laboratory science lull, I’ve found myself obsessively trawling the mission’s raw image archive so I can get my fix of high-resolution imagery from Curiosity’s ongoing mission inside Gale Crater.
While getting lost in the Martian landscape once more, I started tinkering with Curiosity’s raw photos; zooming in, adjusting the contrast, brightness and color. One thing led to another and I found myself stitching together various photos from the rover’s Mastcam camera. Being awash with photographs with little professional insight from mission scientists (as, you know, a noisy minority at Capitol Hill has gagged them by starving the agency of funds), I started to tinker in Photoshop, blindly trying to stitch a selection of Mastcam photos together to see an updated Martian panorama once more. This is the result.
Of particular interest, I found myself staring at the precariously-shaped boulder to the far right of the panorama. I can only guess what geological processes shaped it that way — Wind action? Ancient water flow? — or whether it had simply landed that way after getting blasted from an impact crater, but I was curious as to what JPL mission scientists are making of it. Alas, we’ll have to wait a little longer for the awesome Mars science to begin flowing again.
Here’s that rock:
It felt nice to be absorbed in the Mars landscape again. The photo stitching is rough in places (by far the hardest task was getting the brightness and contrast correct in each photo) and I lack any calibration tools to ensure the color is correct or that the orientation is sound, but it satisfied my curiosity as to what Curiosity was up to on the Red Planet. It has, after all, been over a year since the historic landing of the NASA mission and the regular news updates from NASA and JPL have become something of an intellectual opiate.
Going cold turkey, apparently, makes a space blogger itchy.
Image sources (from left to right):
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=0413ML1707000000E1_DXXX&s=413
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=0413ML1707001000E1_DXXX&s=413
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=0413ML1707002000E1_DXXX&s=413
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=0413ML1707003000E1_DXXX&s=413
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=0413ML1707004000E1_DXXX&s=413
astroengine.com 
Reading this just as my playlist played Clint Mansell’s “Welcome to Lunar Industries” from the movie Moon blew my mind! What a lonely robot…
Really enjoying the RAW images myself. When I saw this photo and that rock, I just figured it was two different rocks, one behind the other. But we’ll have to wait to see it from another angle to be certain.