A sweeping view of the “Pahrump Hills” outcrop on Mars, where NASA’s Curiosity rover has been working for five months, surrounds the rover in Curiosity’s latest self-portrait. The selfie scene is assembled from dozens of images taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera on the rover’s robotic arm. [Click the image to load a larger version in a new tab.]
Pahrump Hills is an outcrop of the bedrock that forms the basal layer of Mount Sharp, at the center of Mars’ Gale Crater. The mission has examined the outcrop with a campaign that included a “walkabout” survey and then increasingly detailed levels of inspection. The rover climbed from the outcrop’s base to higher sections three times to create vertical profiles of the rock structures and chemistry, and to select the best targets for sample-collection drilling… [More at link]