Are you able to think about selecting up a fortunate penny on Mars?
What is it?
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This image was captured on Oct. 2, 2013 on the 411th sol, or Mars day, of the Curiosity rover’s mission on the planet. On the penny’s surface, reddish Martian dust has collected over the 14 months that the mission had already been on Mars by that point.
Why is it incredible?
It’s neat to see a penny on another planet. It’s a (now endangered) relic from our own world minted over 100 years ago, in 1909, feeling the Martian wind dragging dusty debris across its surface millions of miles away.
But this penny serves a surprisingly important purpose: scale. In photographs, it can sometimes be difficult to tell how big or small something is without an object of known size, like a penny or a banana, in frame for scale.
“When a geologist takes pictures of rock outcrops she is studying, she wants an object of known scale in the photographs,” MAHLI Principal Investigator Ken Edgett said in a statement by which NASA refers back to the coin as a “fortunate penny on Mars.”
“If it’s a entire cliff face, she’ll ask an individual to face within the shot. If it’s a view from a meter or so away, she would possibly use a rock hammer. If it’s a close-up, because the MAHLI can take, she would possibly pull one thing small out of her pocket. Like a penny.”
