Seems familiar? This isn't a picture of Earth, but the only possibly habitable planet in our solar system next to Earth, Mars.
National Aeronautic and Space Association (NASA) Curiosity rover, which landed on the planet four years ago, has captured a panoramic image of Mars, which looks very similar to Earth.
The vista, released recently by NASA as part of their long-term advocacy to document landforms traversed by Curiosity, shows flat desert-like foreground which are eroded mesas and buttes called the Murray formation and looks strangely like southwest US.
Curiosity is a robotic rover as big as a car, tasked to explore the Gale Crater on Mars as part of the Mars Science Laboratory mission of NASA.
Launched on November 26, 2011, the Curiosity rover reached the nearest planet to Earth on August 6, 2012. Since them it's been on a mission to find signs life and examine ancient habitable environment on Mars.
In an extended assignment, Phys.org reports that Curiosity is studying the younger layers while climbing the lower part of Mount Sharp, with the goal of finding out how freshwater lake, evolved into the harsh environment-that is the current Mars.
The photo was taken using a Mast Camera (Mastcam) which was designed to capture color, multispectral color, stereo, and high definition video in outer space.
The view is a combination of dozens of photos taken from the top of "Naukluft" inside the Gale Crater.
The white balance of the photos has been adjusted to look like daytime lighting conditions on Earth.
According to Daily Mail, another rover tasked to find traces of life on the red planet was the ExoMars which was assigned to figure out whether gaseous particles in the said planet are coming from geological sources like volcanoes or biological ones such as microbes
NASA is set to launch another spacecraft, the Trace Gas Oribiter, which will eventually be paired with ExoMars in 2018, the report added.
