NASA’s Curiosity rover just celebrated its 5,000th day on Mars, and it marked the occasion the way only a robot 140 million miles from home can: it sent back a postcard.
The image, released by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on September 16, shows the view from a sand ridge the mission team nicknamed “Chocolatal,” in the lower foothills of Mount Sharp inside Gale Crater. The rover’s deck sits in the foreground while the Martian landscape stretches out behind it, washed in blue on one side and gold on the other.
Here is the part that makes it wild. This is not a photograph. Curiosity’s navigation cameras shoot in black and white, so the team captured two full panoramas at two different times of day and merged them. The first was taken on August 30 at 9:56 in the morning, local Mars time, on the mission’s 5,000th sol. The second came on September 2 at 5:39 in the evening, on sol 5,003. Back on Earth, engineers stitched the two together and added color as an artistic interpretation: blue is the morning shot, yellow is the evening one.
Look close and you can spot the hardware. The can-shaped antenna Curiosity uses to beam data up to the orbiters. The finned nuclear power unit at its rear that has kept it alive for well over a decade. Its wheel tracks trailing off into the distance, heading back down toward the crater floor with the rim barely visible on the horizon.
The numbers behind the milestone are the real story. Curiosity was built for a 687-day mission. It has now survived more than 5,000 Martian days, over 5,100 Earth days, since touching down in August 2012. It has driven more than 32 kilometers, climbed a full kilometer up the side of Mount Sharp, and found mineral evidence that liquid water stuck around on Mars for millions of years. Its whole job was to figure out whether Mars could ever have supported microbial life.
Fourteen years in, the little nuclear robot is still rolling uphill. The postcard is just its way of letting us know the view is still worth it.