NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars has been busy, drilling holes in the cause of science and snapping the odd selfie, the space agency is reporting.
Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been instructing the rover to snap a selfie "mosaic" of images at each locations where Curiosity drills into the Martian surface.
At a location where Curiosity drilled into the seventh rock targeted in its mission on the Red Planet, dubbed "Buckskin," the rover captured a selfie a bit different from previous ones, in that it was taken from a low angle.
The rover takes its selfies the same way a cell phone user does, by holding a camera at arm's length facing back toward it.
In this case, one of the rover's robotic arms has been used as a selfie stick.
Of course, it's not a cell phone it's holding but the rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager, or Mahli, usually utilized to take close-up photos of mineral grains in rocks.
To create the new image, NASA scientists stitched together a number of Mahli images — editing out the robotic arm — to create an image of not only the rover but a full 360-degree photo of the Martian landscape it is sitting in.
NASA scientists have been drilling in the area, a site called Marias Pass, since instruments on the rover suggested water molecules were bound to minerals in the site's rocks.
"The ground about 1 meter [3.3 feet] beneath the rover in this area holds three or four times as much water as the ground anywhere else Curiosity has driven during its three years on Mars," says Igor Mitrofanov of the Space Research Institute in Moscow, principal investigator for the Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DANS) instrument used to sense the water molecules.
Powdered samples of the Buckskin rock obtained in the drilling will be analyzed on the rover's onboard instruments in an effort to understand why there seems to be an abundance of water molecules in the Maria Pass area, scientists said.
The Buckskin examination marked the first full-on drilling effort by Curiosity since a short circuit was detected briefly in the percussive hammering mechanism of the drill in February.
"We were pleased to see no repeat of the short circuit during the Buckskin drilling and sample transfer," says Steven Lee, deputy project manager for Curiosity at JPL.
Since finishing its drilling at Maria Pass, Curiosity has been climbing through the lower reaches of Mount Sharp, an area it has been at since September 2014.
Mission scientists say the climb, and Curiosity's observations as it goes, will allow them to obtain a history of the changing environmental conditions the area may have experienced.
