At 05:01:15 UTC the Mastcam Left has captured a beautiful white cloud standing out in a clear blue Martian sky!
This is not the only cloud photographed, actually between Sol 2049 and Sol 3050 several clouds have been shot (see https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw-images/? order=sol+desc%2Cinstrument_sort+asc%2Csample_type_sort+asc%2C+date_taken+desc&per_page=50&page=0&mission=msl&begin_sol=3049&end_sol=3050&af=MAST_LEFT%7CMAST_RIGHT%2C%2C), but I chose this photo because it seemed the most representative.
It is evident that this is a cirrus made of water ice crystals; one only has to wonder how such a (officially) dry atmosphere can give rise to such dense clouds!
In fact, if we consider that (officially) if we condense all the steam contained in the atmosphere we would get a layer of water of about one hundredth of a millimeter, the formation of such clouds should be impossible!
Yet the clouds are there to see, nice and thick and plump!
The original image is a black and white encoding of the Bayer mask that has been converted to color through a process called “debayering” or “demosaicing”. In addition, the photo has undergone noise reduction due to Jpeg compression, white balance and a slight increase in microcontrast and color saturation in order to make the colors more similar to what the human eye would see.
Original image: https://mars.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/03049/mcam/3049ML0159290120407960C00_DXXX.jpg
This post has been automatically translated. See the original post here.