First Color Photo Form the Surface of Mars

The Mars rover Curiosity has sent back its first colour images of the red planet's surface.

And it turns out Mars is kind of... orangey.

The billion dollar, one-ton vehicle, which landed on Mars early Monday in what Nasa called its 'hardest ever' mission, sent the photos back via a satellite above the planet. The six-wheeled rover Curiosity was lowered to the Martian surface on three nylon tethers suspended from a hovering "sky crane" firing retro rockets. For the next 98 weeks - the length of one Martian year - Curiosity will explore a large Martian crater that billions of years ago may have been filled with water. The nuclear-powered rover is bristling with sophisticated technology designed to discover if the planet may once have supported life - including several cameras. The photo shows the rover's view north. The distant ridge is the north wall and rim of Gale Crater. The photo was in fact taken with the rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager. It is blurry and indistinct because it was taken while the camera's transparent dust cover was still on. The fall of the rover left the camera coated in material, Nasa said, and some of the landscape has been enhanced with computer imagery.

Nasa explained: The peak seen on the left-side of the image is about 15 miles (24 kilometers) distant with a height of about 3,775 feet (1,150 meters) high. The box with arrows at the upper left indicates direction. The arrow pointing up is "up" with respect to the gravity of Mars. The arrow pointing to the right is east. North would be an arrow pointing into the image (that is, the view is toward the north).




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MARS COLOR IMAGE GALLERY

Mars from above showing a definite atmosphere. Amazing.
















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The following series is color enhanced but still give a better idea of the landscape than black and white.

This is a little closer to what the surface actually looks like.