Just as a result of you’ll be able to’t catch a shuttle to Mars fairly but doesn’t imply you’ll be able to’t nonetheless tour the Red Planet. This week, NASA launched a video showcasing a panoramic tour of the planet’s floor utilizing pictures snapped by its Curiosity rover, which celebrates its ninth yr on Mars this month.

The rover captured the 360-degree view on July 3 close to “Rafael Navarro Mountain,” a hill NASA has nicknamed after an astrobiologist who labored on the mission and handed away in January. The panorama is made up of 129 particular person pictures stitched collectively, and its colours have been white-balanced to copy how Mars would seem beneath the form of daylight we’re used to right here on Earth, NASA mentioned in a press release. You can try the video tour under:

The rover has been puttering in regards to the Gale Crater, a 96-mile-wide (154-kilometer-wide) basin on Mars, since first touchdown there in 2012. Around this time of yr, the planet’s winter, the signature crimson haze of mud surrounding Mars has cleared up a bit, giving Curiosity a transparent view of the crater’s flooring and the 16 miles (25.7 kilometers) it has traveled over the course of its mission.

These snapshots additionally present some attention-grabbing insights into how the planet’s surroundings has advanced over hundreds of thousands of years. The area that Curiosity beforehand explored was dominated by clay-rich rocks that shaped in lakes, however now it’s discovering rocks crammed with salty minerals known as sulfates.

“The rocks here will begin to tell us how this once-wet planet changed into the dry Mars of today, and how long habitable environments persisted even after that happened,” mentioned Abigail Fraeman, Curiosity’s deputy venture scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

It’s inside this historic Martian surroundings that scientists consider life might have existed on the planet, which is why Curiosity and NASA’s different Mars rover, Perseverance, are combing the world for clues. Over the following yr, NASA mentioned Curiosity will enterprise previous Rafael Navarro Mountain and one other mountain that’s taller than a four-story constructing. After that, it is going to enter a slim canyon earlier than revisiting a slope with a sandstone cap nicknamed “Greenheugh Pediment” that it beforehand summited in 2020.