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NASA's Mars Exploration Program (source images: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Curiosity rover on its Mars Science Laboratory mission to assess whether Mars ever had an environment able to support small life forms called microbes.
The majority of images for this panorama were captured on day, Sol 3, of Curiosity's 1 martian year mission, by its 34mm Mast Camera. On Sol 13 before the rover moved the top of Mount Sharp was also captured.
*The panorama was updated on Aug 23, 2012 with new images that were previously unavailable.
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The planet Earth has proven to be too limiting for our awesome community of panorama photographers. We're getting an increasing number of submissions that depict locations either not on Earth (like Mars, the Moon, and Outer Space in general) or do not realistically represent a geographic location on Earth (either because they have too many special effects or are computer generated) and hence don't strictly qualify for our Panoramic World project.But many of these panoramas are extremely beautiful or popular of both.So, in order to accommodate our esteemed photographers and the huge audience that they attract to 360Cities with their panoramas, we've created a new section (we call it an "area") called "Out of this World" for panoramas like these.Don't let the fact that these panoramas are being placed at the Earth's South Pole fool you - we had to put them somewhere in order not to interfere with our Panoramic World.Welcome aboard on a journey "Out of this World".