• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

NASA Reveals Incredible Rare New View Of Mars’s Horizon From Space

November 29, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

NASA has revealed an incredible – and unusual – new view of Mars’s horizon, one that took three months to plan and execute, for our viewing pleasure. Astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) orbiting Earth often share mesmerizing views of Earth’s curvature, but this is what you would see if you were orbiting Mars.

The incredible panoramic image is a composite stitched together end to end from 10 images taken by the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) onboard NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter. It shows the curving Martian landscape below layers of cloud and dust. It doesn’t just look fantastic – it will help scientists gain new insights into Mars’s atmosphere.  

Advertisement

In fact, this view is so unusual that no other Mars spacecraft has actually seen this type of view before, according to Jonathon Hill, operations lead for THEMIS. “If there were astronauts in orbit over Mars, this is the perspective they would have,” he said in a statement.

The view shows the curvature of Mars as seen from 400 kilometers (250 miles) above the surface – the same altitude that the ISS flies above Earth. However, while astronauts cruising above us regularly see (and snap) our pale blue dot’s curvature, it was no easy feat capturing Mars’s.

“In order to get these images, we had to do something with the spacecraft we’ve never done before,” deputy project scientist for Odyssey, Laura Kerber, explains in the video below.

“Usually our camera faces straight down for mapping. In the past we’ve experimented with rolling the spacecraft so we can catch pictures of some of Mars’s moons… but this time we had to do something even more extreme, We had to rotate the spacecraft all the way to the horizon, then we had to keep it that way for an entire orbit.”

Advertisement



It took three months of planning with engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Lockheed Martin Space, which co-manages operations of the mission. THEMIS uses infrared to map the ice, sand, rock, and dust on Mars as well as any temperature changes on the planet’s surface. It also measures water ice and dust in the atmosphere, but usually just a thin column looking down, as Kerber mentioned.

To get a more expansive view, the team couldn’t just change the angle of the camera – they had the rotate the whole spacecraft 90 degrees while making sure the Sun could still reach its solar panels. The prime angle turned out to be pointing its antennae away from Earth, meaning the crew on the ground lost contact with the spacecraft for several hours as it completed its task.

If you really want to pretend you’re the first Martian astronaut orbiting Mars, find the largest screen you have and open the image here.

Advertisement

Having this view will help scientists understand more about Mars’s thin atmosphere, which is less than 1 percent as thick as Earth’s. This view will help them understand where the layers of water-ice clouds and dust are in relation to each other; either one big layer or stacked on top of each other. 

“I think of it as viewing a cross-section, a slice through the atmosphere,” said Jeffrey Plaut, Odyssey’s project scientist at JPL. “There’s a lot of detail you can’t see from above, which is how THEMIS normally makes these measurements.”

Odyssey has been going strong for 22 years, making it the longest-running spacecraft ever sent to Mars. Next year it will hit the milestone of 100,000 orbits.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Turkey mutually parts ways with head coach Senol Gunes
  2. China Evergrande shares slide 6% in early trade
  3. What Would Happen To Humanity If All Microbes Suddenly Disappeared?
  4. IFLScience The Big Questions: How Is Climate Change Affecting Polar Bear Populations?

Source Link: NASA Reveals Incredible Rare New View Of Mars’s Horizon From Space

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version