From Emily Lakdawalla’s blog at The Planetary Society: Whenever Curiosity drills at a new site on Mars, the team tries to take a self-portrait as part of the documentation of the drill site. On sol 1065, Curiosity took its most recent self-portrait — from a brand-new perspective. The image is all the more amazing when you see how many individual frames the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) had to take in order to cover the 360-degree view.
It’s fun. But why this different point of view from previous panoramas? And were there any special challenges in making it? I talked with both the rover driver who headed up the development of the arm sequence (Joseph Carsten) and engineers and scientists who developed the camera (Mike Ravine and Ken Edgett) to learn more about this special self-portrait… [More at link]