The HiRISE camera aboard the MRO probe has captured photographs of the Curiosity rover, which continues to move towards the top of Mount Sharp and is now temporarily parked by the "living" dunes on its upper slopes, NASA reports.
The Curiosity rover has been operating on the surface of Mars for the fourth year now, receiving unique data about its past and modern appearance. For the past two years, NASA's fourth rover has been tackling one problem - it is trying to climb the summit of Mount Sharp in the central part of Gale Crater.
This mountain, as scientists explain, is a kind of multilayer "cake" of sediments accumulated at the bottom of the lake, which existed at the bottom of Gale crater in the distant past, when Mars had a thick atmosphere, oceans and was relatively warm.
The study of its rocks has already helped John Grotzinger, the mission's scientific director, and his colleagues to figure out what the lakes of Mars looked like during different periods of its existence and to prove that they were warm and suitable for the existence of life for almost a billion years.
Curiosity is now located in the upper part of the mountain, on the so-called "Naukluft Plateau", where rocks formed at a time when Mars began to lose its atmosphere and water and gradually became dry. The rover recently discovered unusual sand deposits in this part of the plateau, which showed that the red planet continued to remain "wet" much longer than scientists previously believed.
The MRO probe periodically receives photographs of the rover, which help scientists navigate its route to the top of Mount Sharp and look for new deposits of sediment, studying which can expand our understanding of how Mars evolved in the past.
The latest photos from Curiosity, taken by the HiRISE camera aboard the MRO, captured the rover while docking at the edge of the so-called Bagnold Dunes, a "living" accumulation of sand that gradually moves along the slopes of Mount Sharp under the influence of wind. Near their eastern outskirts, as scientists say, there are rather large deposits of hematite - an "iron" mineral that forms on Earth in hot springs and volcanic lakes.
Named after astronomer Vera Rubin, who discovered dark matter, the Curiosity research team hopes that studying these deposits will help to understand where the water on the surface of Mars came from at an era when the red planet could no longer keep it from evaporating into space.
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