Curiosity's View Back After Passing 'Junda' Striations . photonado

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Curiosity's View Back After Passing 'Junda' Striations

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover used the Navigation Camera (Navcam) on its mast for this look back after finishing a drive of 328 feet (100 meters) on the 548th Martian day, or sol, of the rover's work on Mars (Feb. 19, 2014). The rows of rocks just to the right of the fresh wheel tracks in this view are an outcrop called "Junda." The rows form striations on the ground, a characteristic seen in some images of this area taken from orbit. A panorama made from Navcam images taken during a pause to observe Junda partway through the Sol 548 drive is available at PIA17947 .For scale, the distance between Curiosity's parallel wheel tracks is about 9 feet (2.7 meters). This view is looking toward the east-northeast. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed and built the project's Curiosity rover and the rover's Navcam. More information about Curiosity is online at http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ .

Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Image released by NASA on 2014-02-27 as catalog id PIA17949