This week, NASA released some amazing panoramas and other images of Mars taken by the Curiosity rover. These images reveal sulfate-bearing rocks, boulders deposited by ancient streams, flaky and layered rocks, and rocks where sand scoured the surface and left behind tracks.

The ten-year-old rover is having a few issues of its own these days, though. Recently, Curiosity went into safe mode when a control box read as warmer than expected. The situation only lasted two days, and engineers suspect a faulty temperature reading from a sensor.

On top of that, Curiosity’s wheels are suffering from the wear and tear expected after ten years on Mars, roving over the hard and sometimes hazardous ground. The mission team will continue to have the rover take pictures of the wheels every 500 meters to assess the damage. However, project manager Megan Lin remains unconcerned, stating: We have proven through ground testing that we can safely drive on the wheel rims if necessary. If we ever reached the point that a single wheel had broken a majority of its grousers, we could do a controlled break to shed the pieces that are left. Due to recent trends, it seems unlikely that we would need to take such action. The wheels are holding up well, providing the traction we need to continue our climb.

Good luck, Curiosity, and safe travels.

We’ll have a link to those images in our show notes at DailySpace.org. Make sure to give them a look as they really are impressive.

More Information

NASA JPL image release