Images of Gale #26
About this image
During the month of April Mars will be in conjunction relative to the Earth. This means the Sun is in the line-of-sight between Earth and Mars, and communication between the two planets is almost impossible. For conjunction, the rovers and orbiting spacecraft at Mars continue to operate, but do not send the data to Earth. This recorded data will be sent to Earth when Mars moves away from the sun and the line-of-sight between Earth and Mars is reestablished. During conjunction the THEMIS image of the day will be a visual tour of Gale Crater, the location of the newest rover Curiosity.
Backtracking a bit, this image shows the large channel in the upper left of the frame. Just below the brighter material of Mt. Sharp is the start of the arced edge of material we saw in yesterday's image (top right).
Please see the THEMIS Data Citation Note for details on crediting THEMIS images.