Although no longer in the current news, the Mars Curiosity rover continues to provide information about Marsmore than 10 years after his arrival on the red planet, in August 2012. As is common when we talk about an engineering genius signed by NASA, he left Earth with an expected life of 23 months on Mars, but today he has already exceeded 136 and does not seem to it was about to end.

Of course, the Perseverance probe and its inseparable companion, the Ingenuity helicopter, which has the honor of being the first device designed by humans to fly on another planet, have a large share in the “disappearance” of Curiosity from public interest. In fact, if you ask about active Mars probes today, many people will answer exclusively by citing the Perseverance program. thereby forgetting that Ingenuity is also active.

In these years, it is true that they do It scared ussuch as when he had to go into emergency mode in July 2016 or when he became “disoriented” in January 2020, but also provided us with the most relevant informationbecause some samples were taken that confirmed that once there was dense water with salts and minerals, in a composition similar to what we can find on Earth, not to mention impressive images like the one we got after the rover had to suffer a sandstorm .

Let’s not be fooled, it is true that the contribution of these missions to science is sensational, but we all like to see photos and videos that, although in some cases they do not give us much, but allow us to observe parts of the Universe in a unique way.. And we can say about that A 12-hour video of the surface of Mars captured by Curiosity and published by NASA. A video in which we can see, condensed into 17 seconds, the period from sunrise to sunset.

Although published now, the video was captured by Curiosity last November, specifically When the solar conjunction of Mars was taking place, the period in which the Sun is between Earth and Mars, making communication difficult. To avoid risks, the probe is parked in a safe position under these circumstances, but this allows it to capture images similar to those we can see in the video.