360 Degrees

The excellent website 360cities.net have merged several panorama images taken by Curiosity to enable complete freedom in exploring the landscape around the rover. As you can pan around the arid landscape and zoom in at will.

Click the link to experience your own virtual trip on the red planet. Virtual Mars

Curiosity Gets Ready to Rove the Red Planet

NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover team member Jessica Samuels updates you on developments and status of the mission now that it’s preparing to explore Gale Crater. Curiosity carries 10 science instruments with a total mass 15 times as large as the science payloads on NASA’s Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Some of the tools, such as a laser-firing instrument for checking rocks’ elemental composition from a distance, are the first of their kind on Mars. Curiosity will use a drill and scoop, which are located at the end of its robotic arm, to gather soil and powdered samples of rock interiors, then sieve and parcel out these samples into the rover’s analytic laboratory instruments.

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http://www.nasa.gov/mars
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