Here’s a new image of the Mars Curiosity rover looking like a conquering hero on an alien world.
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The NASA Curiosity Rover has taken a “selfie” using its robotic arm.
NASA processes the images Curiosity delivers in a number of different ways, while also making the raw photos available online. The MAHLI camera on Curiosity’s robotic arm took dozens of component images for this selfie on August 5, 2015.
NASA’s Curiosity rover captured a glorious selfie on Mars this month, shortly before resuming its trek up a huge Red Planet mountain.
Curiosity initially noted the area with high silica and hydrogen on May 21 while climbing to a site where two types of sedimentary bedrock lie in contact with each other.
The newest photograph was taken at “Buckskin”, the seventh place where the rover has drilled into rock to collect samples for analysis since the start of its mission, BBC said.
It is located in the area where built-in Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) instrument of the vehicle discovered high hydrogen levels that may indicate an abundance of water molecules on the minerals and rocks in that part. According to a report form the Economic Times, the rover has been heading southwest after studying a mountainous region with abnormally high levels of silica and hydrogen in the ground.
The Buckskin operations marked Curiosity’s first full-on drilling work since a brief short circuit was observed in the drill’s hammering percussive mechanism in February.
This view of a test rover at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
Indeed the car-sized rover has taken spectacular selfies several times before during her three year long trek across the Martian surface, since the August 2012 landing inside Mars’ Gale Crater.
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Lee adds that the short circuit may return but the team already made important changes in its fault protection to safely drill in the most even manner even if there are minor shorts. We also improved drill percuss circuit telemetry to gain more diagnostic information from any future occurrences.
