New Curiosity rover selfie makes Mars the star of the snapshot
Curiosity's latest self-portrait shows the plucky machine surrounded by Mars landscape details, including Mount Sharp, cliffs and the crater rim.
In mid-2014, NASA's Curiosity rover celebrated its first full Martian year with a selfie that gave space fans back on Earth a thrill. That taste for selfie fame hasn't subsided. The rover's latest self-portrait, released Tuesday, is another winner. Though Curiosity is the lead subject of the shot, much of the real interest lies in the surrounding landscape.
The selfie is set at the Mojave site where the rover drilled into the base of Mount Sharp, an area known as Pahrump Hills. In case you're wondering, Pahrump is a town in Nevada.
"Compared with the earlier Curiosity selfies, we added extra frames for this one so we could see the rover in the context of the full Pahrump Hills campaign," said rover team member Kathryn Stack from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Curiosity captured the self-portrait using its version of a selfie stick, which is a robotic arm with the Mars Hand Lens Imager camera attached. NASA's rover team used dozen of images taken by the camera to compile the final selfie.
The images are from late January. Curiosity has since moved on to Telegraph Peak, the next planned drilling location. The Telegraph Peak area is visible toward the upper middle of the selfie.
NASA released two versions of the image, one of which has notable landscape features labeled. There's Upper Mount Sharp extending over the horizon in the upper left side of the photo. The Mojave drilling site can be seen close to the left side of the rover. The crater rim stretches off to the upper right.
Curiosity will likely have more selfies in store for its adoring public. It still has a lot of exploring to do across the surface of the Red Planet.