Curiosity Captures Meteor

Hey, nice catch, Curiosity! I wonder if it might be possible to figure out where it hit.

mars.jpl.nasa.gov...

originally posted by: Blue Shift
Hey, nice catch, Curiosity!

mars.jpl.nasa.gov...

Have you got a news item for that...any comments from NASA.

originally posted by: smurfy
Have you got a news item for that...any comments from NASA.

Haven't seen any. I was just poking around the images out of habit.

a reply to: Blue Shift

Maybe the Martian atmosphere isn't so thin....

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”
― H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Huh... This was the first thing that popped into my weird little brain. Cool picture, though.

a reply to: Aliensun

It's thin, but deep.

Meteors burn in the upper reaches of the Earth's atmosphere. They do the same on Mars. On Mars they may burn at a lower altitude, but they still burn.

Could be either a meteor or a cosmic ray strike on the camera's sensor.

Peeps at the Unmanned Spaceflight Forum suggest keeping an eye on any future HiRISE images of Gale crater for signs of a fresh impact.

very cool
i always forget curiosity has an night vision camera
s+f

a reply to: wildespace

unlikely that if it survived the atmosphere, it made any serious damage to the surface

originally posted by: wildespace
Could be either a meteor or a cosmic ray strike on the camera's sensor.

This thing has a long tail. Cosmic ray strikes are generally only a few pixels long. Here's a similar photo that came in today that shows a cosmic ray strike. The animation is the image with another one taken about 45 seconds after. Use Ctl-+ to zoom in.