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Curiosity Captures a Spaghetti Western Landscape on Mars

Aug. 3, 2020
This wide panorama was taken by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover on Dec. 19, 2019. On the righthand foreground is Western Butte. The ridge with a crusty cap in the background is the Greenheugh pediment.

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This wide panorama was taken by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover on Dec. 19, 2019, the 2,620th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. On the righthand foreground is Western Butte; the ridge with a crusty cap in the background is the Greenheugh pediment, which Curiosity ascended in March of 2020.

The rover's Mast Camera, or Mastcam, used its telephoto lens to produce the panorama, which includes 130 individual images stitched together. The panorama has been white-balanced so that the colors of the rock materials resemble how they would appear under daytime lighting conditions on Earth.

Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego built and operates Mastcam. A division of Caltech, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the Mars Science Laboratory mission for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington and built the Curiosity rover.

For more information about Curiosity, visit http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl or https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html.

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