Sol 365: Steady driving

Curiosity is steadily making its way towards Mount Sharp and so far she's making good time and just like that the 2km mark is just metres away as of sol 365.

This calls for a colour panorama!

A 360 degree partial true colour panorama shot by the rover's
Mastcam (left eye)on sol 364. (NASA/JPL/MSSS/Panorama by Abraham Samma)

Besides showing a gorgeous view of the mount and the faraway walls of Gale carter there are also some subtle but interesting features present in this seemingly monotonous view.  If you look carefully on the right side of the panorama, you'll notice a conspicuous pile of black basaltic boulders (rocks of volcanic origin). The boulders appear to sit on a mound which might suggest an eroded intrusive volcanic feature like a dike though like I've said many times before, I'm not a geologist (professional anyway)! Earth has plenty of such features too so these are typical to both planets. Whatever they are they warranted more remote sensing by the rover which I've stitched accordingly. This shot was made the next sol before the rover drove around 26m more:

Sol 365 shot of the boulder mound with the right eye
of the Mastcam (NASA/JPL/MSSS/mosaic by Abraham Samma)

The same could be said for the one next to the rover's tracks to the left of the first panorama and many other similar sites around the area which are revealed beautifully in the HiRise map.

That's it for this update. Just incase you haven't seen, check out this beautiful gif animation made from images captured on the night of sol 351. It shows the moon Phobos (the largest of Mars' two moons) crossing and eclipsing Deimos (the smaller of the two) for a few seconds. Beautiful! I'd like to write more about these two moons later as there is so much to talk about these two enchanting bodies than can be said in this brief update.

The entire passage took 55 seconds
(NASA/JPL/MSSS)

Until then, stay curious!