The Very First Pictures Of Mars At Night

Mars Curiosity Rover just downloaded some great pictures of Mars at night. These were the first the rover has taken of the Red Planet at night. Check them out below.

Here's a picture of Martian rock from the Yellowknife Bay area of the Mars Gale Crater. It's been dubbed Sayunei. It was taken on the night of Jan. 22, Curiosity's 165th day on Mars. Curiosity used her front-left wheel to scuff the rock and wipe off dust from the region.

The rock is being lit up with UV light from the rover. The image hasn't been analyzed, so we don't know what the glowing areas mean.

"The purpose of acquiring observations under ultraviolet illumination was to look for fluorescent minerals," Ken Edgett, who runs the MAHLI program, said in a NASA press release. "These data just arrived this morning. The science team is still assessing the observations. If something looked green, yellow, orange or red under the ultraviolet illumination, that'd be a more clear-cut indicator of fluorescence."

Here's the same area, lit up by white light.