A "selfie" taken by NASA's Curiosity Rover shows the location where the rover has been working the last five months - the "Pahrump Hills" projection on Mars, according to NASA. The image is actually a composite of dozens of images taken by the rover.
And Curiosity doesn't need a selfie stick! The rover takes photos of itself by using the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera on the rover's robotic arm.
Pahrump Hills is a protrusion of the bedrock that forms the basal layer of Mount Sharp, which is at the center of Mars' Gale Crater. Rover conducted a "walkabout" survey and increasingly became more thorough. Rover climbed from the base of the outcrop to higher elevations three times to get vertical profiles of the rock structures and chemistry before deciding the best areas to conduct drilling and collect samples.
The images used for this self-portrait were taken in late January at a drilling site called "Mojave 2." (To read about Curiosity's drilling findings there, click here). Since Curiosity is done with Mojave 2, it has driven to its next target - "Telegraph Peak."
Curiosity took self-portraits at three other sites before it arrived at the base of Mount Sharp. "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 at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), according to the news release. "From the Mojave site, we could include every stop we've made during the campaign."
NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project uses the data from Curiosity to evaluate ancient habitable environments and assess major changes in Martian environmental conditions, according to NASA.
Malin Space Science Systems, located in San Diego, Calif., developed, built and operates MAHLI. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, built Curiosity Rover and administers the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C.
