What Will Curiosity's "View" Be as it Approaches the Red Planet?

By Nancy Atkinson - July 31, 2012 at 10:12 PM UTC | Planetary Science
curiosity-landing-eyes.png

Imagine if you were tucked away inside the Mars Science Laboratory backshell, just like the Curiosity rover. What would you see as you approached Mars? Bill Dunford from

Riding With Robots on the High Frontier

wanted to know the same thing. "I was wondering what Mars would look like if you could physically ride along," he wrote. "If you were somehow onboard the spacecraft that's carrying the rover, and you had a window to look through, what would you be able to see?"

To find out, he took advantage of

NASA's Eyes on the Solar System website

. This amazing tool creates realistic simulated views based on real data, and allows you to travel to any planet, moon or spacecraft across time and space, in 3D and in real time. It is absolutely awesome and very fun to play with! Bill created the video above by using Eyes on the Solar System, which provides a great look at the view approaching Mars.

Then, Bill also used

Eyes on the Solar System

to follow Curiosity down to the surface and view the landing, which, if all goes well on 10:31 p.m. PDT on August 5th (05:31 UTC on Aug. 6), should look something like this:

Of course, no one will be there on Mars to see it happen, and we won't know for at least 14 minutes after the fact if it happened successfully. So consider yourself lucky to have this sneak peak!

See more screenshots and information at

Riding With Robots

, and check out Bill's one-page "

Cheat Sheet

" which provides a quick guide to the mission and the landing, with links to all sorts of information.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com