NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Takes a New Selfie Before Record Climb
Along with capturing an image before its steepest ascent ever, the robotic explorer filmed its "selfie stick," or robotic arm, in action.
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover recently set a record for the
steepest terrain it's ever climbed, cresting the "Greenheugh
Pediment," a broad sheet of rock that sits atop a hill. And before
doing that, the rover took a selfie, capturing the scene just below Greenheugh.
In front of the rover is a hole it drilled while sampling
a bedrock target called "Hutton." The entire selfie is a 360-degree panorama
stitched together from 86 images relayed to Earth. The selfie captures the rover
about 11 feet (3.4 meters) below the point where it climbed onto the crumbling pediment.
Curiosity finally reached the top of the slope March 6 (the
2,696th Martian day, or sol, of the mission). It took three drives to scale the
hill, the second of which tilted
the rover 31 degrees - the most the rover has
ever tilted on Mars and just shy of the now-inactive Opportunity rover's
32-degree
tilt record, set in 2016. Curiosity took the selfie on Feb. 26, 2020 (Sol
2687).
Since 2014, Curiosity has been rolling up Mount Sharp, a
3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain at the center of Gale Crater. Rover
operators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California carefully map
out each drive to make sure Curiosity will be safe. The rover is never in
danger of tilting so much that it would flip over - Curiosity's
rocker-bogie wheel system enables it to tilt up to 45 degrees safely - but the
steep drives do cause the wheels to spin in place.
How Are Selfies Taken?
Before the climb, Curiosity used the black-and-white
Navigation Cameras located on its mast to, for the first time, record a short
movie of its "selfie stick," otherwise known as its robotic arm.
Curiosity's mission is to study whether the Martian
environment could have supported microbial life billions of years ago. One tool
for doing that is the Mars Hand Lens
Camera, or MAHLI, located in the turret at the end of the robotic arm. This
camera provides a close-up view of sand
grains and rock textures, similarly to how a geologist uses a handheld
magnifying glass for a closer look in the field on Earth.
By rotating the turret to face the rover, the team can use
MAHLI to show Curiosity. Because each MAHLI image covers only a small area, it requires
many images and arm positions to fully capture the rover and its surroundings.
"We
get asked so often how Curiosity takes a selfie," said Doug Ellison, a
Curiosity camera operator at JPL. "We thought the best way to explain it
would be to let the rover show everyone from its own point of view just how
it's done."
This video shows how the robotic arm on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover moves as it takes a selfie.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
In this video, JPL imaging specialist Justin Maki explains how NASA's Mars Curiosity rover takes a selfie. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Located in Pasadena, California,
Caltech manages JPL for NASA, and JPL, which built Curiosity, manages the
project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.MAHLI
was built by Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego.
For more about Curiosity:
https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/home/
http://nasa.gov/msl
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