Big Wheels Keep on Rollin' . photonado

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Big Wheels Keep on Rollin'

This image taken by a front Hazard-Avoidance camera on NASA's Curiosity shows track marks from the rover's first Martian drives. The rover's Bradbury Landing site and its first tire marks are seen at center, in the distance, while tracks from the second drive are in the foreground. Mount Sharp is on the horizon, which is curved to due to the camera's fisheye lens. In Curiosity's second drive, it rotated about 90 degrees, rolled about 16 feet (5 meters), then rotated back about 120 degrees to face roughly the same direction from which it started. The drive placed it over a scour mark called Goulburn, an area of bedrock exposed by thrusters on the rover's sky crane. Scientists will continue their investigations there. JPL manages the Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The rover was designed, developed and assembled at JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. For more about NASA's Curiosity mission, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/msl , http://www.nasa.gov/mars , and http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl .

Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Image released by NASA on 2012-08-27 as catalog id PIA16109