At the time of posting (5:17 UTC) Curiosity has been on Mars for 11 Earth years!
There’s a post claiming that Curiosity sings itself happy birthday each year - it did it’s first year, but it hasn’t since. Power is an in-demand resource, especially this year when we’re in the dead of winter with an aging battery and still trying to pack in science as we climb Mount Sharp!
This past earth year has been a great one for the decade-old rover. We crossed into the sulfate region, which contains more “salty” minerals which probably formed later in Mars’ history when the planet was transitioning from its wet past to its dry present.
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Despite this we still saw evidence of past water, which we thought we’d left behind lower down the mountain!
We’re not just looking down with our robot geologist - the present climate is a treasure trove. It’s the middle of the cloudy season on Mars, and earlier this year Curiosity saw some stunning twilight clouds lit by the just-set sun. This included seeing crepuscular rays for the first time on Mars, and a stunning, feather-like cloud.
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Curiosity has faced challenging terrain from the hard rocks of the marker band to the slippy slidy ridge it navigated quite recently, but 11 years after landing it’s still going strong with a team back on earth helping it navigate the challenges it faces.
now that i’m older and understand how absolutely fucked the housing market is, all those horror movies that take place in nice houses where the family refuses to leave make sense. if i had a 4,000sqft vintage home you’d need to kill me before i ever moved out as well. fuck the ghost. charge it rent.
The earliest color films, from the mid-1890s, were colored by hand, frame by frame, using tiny brushes—sometimes only a single camel hair. The work was extraordinarily labor intensive. One film-coloring workshop, run by Elisabeth Thuillier in Paris, employed approximately 200 female colorists. “I spent my nights selecting and sampling the colors, and during the day, the workers applied the color according to my instructions,” Thuillier recalled in a 1929 interview. “Each specialized worker applied only one color, and we often exceeded 20 colors on a film.”
I actually gasped at this. The color is so shocking against the grey, in the best possible way!
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She/Her • Bisexual • 28 yrs