NASA NEWS: 360 VIRTUAL TOURS CUROSITY ON MARS
News topics in the USA, tend to be: Paul Ryan or NASA news. Take your pick.
The New Zealand Herald is even doing both, reporting today: “NASA has released a 360-degree panoramic view of Mars. The Mars Curiosity Rover captured the 360 panoramic view using its navigation cameras.
The virtual tour is like an animated video game where an audience is given the feeling like they are standing on the planet themselves. The nuclear-powered, six-wheel Curiosity Rover will spend the next two years chiselling into rocks and scooping up soil at Gale Crater to determine whether the environment ever had the right conditions for microbes to thrive.
It will spend a chunk of its time driving to Mount Sharp where images from space reveal signs of past water on the lower flanks.”
Scientists so far are positing that Mars once had water before the planet died and ran out of water. Why perhaps the NASA story is so fascinating to Americans living in severere drought conditions in the Mid-West of the USA. A planet without water is the exploration’s main message, so far in raising new possibilities of space travel and exploration.
[News source: New Zealand Herald & AP. The panoramic camera is available at 360cities.net]
~Posted by Horiwoodblog, Aotearoa New Zealand, Polynesia Asia-Pacific. 16.8.12~
