This is a series of cebes. I'm John Bachelor. Behind the Black, happy birthday Bob Zimmerman. Your subscriptions and donations are most welcome because we're going to

Mars. Mars and Curiosity and Gail Crater. Bob puts up these pictures and then he

puts little red dot line so we can see the road ahead.

But again, every time I see Mars, I think,

Bob, this looks more and more like the covers

of science fiction 35-cent paperbacks I used to buy in 1960 in a drug store.

It doesn't look where...

Yeah, that's exactly what it is, John, yeah.

I've busted on today on behind the black a wonderful mosaic three images from

Curiosity's left navigation camera. This in this case it's looking back

across Gale Crater looking down the mountain which case it's looking back across Gail Crater looking down the mountain, which means it's looking back where it came.

So the red dotted line you see there, John, is the route Curiosity took to get to where it's sitting right now.

And it's sitting in a valley, a slot canyon called

Guinness Valis, and it's looking out over Gail Crater, you can see very faintly in the

haze, the rim of Gail Crater 20 miles away.

And you can see the mountains, the foothills that it climbed up to get here.

It's climbed about, I'm off top of my head, about 1,500 to 2,000 feet from the floor of the crater. It still has around

13,000 feet to climb to get to the top of Mount Sharp and that's about 20 miles away.

So it's got a long way to go before it's going to get to the top of the mountain. But along the way it's seen as spectacular scenery.

The Hayes tells us this is dust season in on Mars. It's just really cool.

Ingenuity, like Helen, launching a thousand ships.

Ingenuity is going to launch a thousand helicopters.

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