Mars rover snaps spooky portraits
A mosaic of images from the Curiosity rover’s Mars Hand Lens Imager shows the rover’s camera mast and deck. The pictures were taken on Oct. 31 during operations at a Martian sampling site known as Rocknest.
It looks as if someone is taking portraits of NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars from a few feet away — but wait a minute: Who’s the photographer?
The answer is that Curiosity itself is responsible for the pictures, with strong assists from image-processing gurus. These views show the six-wheeled, nuclear-powered mobile laboratory at a geological site of interest known as Glenelg, as of Sol 84 (Oct. 31). They were assembled from imagery captured by the Mars Hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI, looking backward from the end of the rover’s 7-foot-long (2.1-meter-long) robotic arm.
