Mars Curiosity

Whoa: now that just might be (as Bad Astronomy blogger Dr. Phil Plait calls it) “the single greatest vacation picture ever taken.” The setting: somewhere in Gale Crater, on the surface of Mars. The subject: the Mars Curiosity rover… in a self-portrait. My first thought: the rover must have set up a camera on a tripod, and backed up a bit before triggering the shutter remotely. (Hey, if an engineering team can plan and execute a landing like this one, such a shot would seem to be small potatoes.) But no: the camera which took this photo is actually mounted on a mast arm which can be held out away from the rover’s body and aimed in any old direction — including back at itself.

So where is the mast arm in the photo? It’s there, all right: 55 times. That’s the number of separate images combined into one final shot; the mast has simply been cropped or otherwise edited out of the images wherever it appeared.

(A blogger at the Planetary Society also notes that if you view the full-sized image, you can see reflections of the mast arm camera in a couple of spots — essentially making this one of those classic “this is me, taking a photo of a camera taking a photo of me” gimmick shots.)

You can view or download a larger version of the photo here (1280 x 1780, 599KB) here, or the full-sized monster (5463 x 7595, 7.7MB) here. Either of those will allow you to see much more detail in small areas.

People, people: how cool is it to be alive at a time when we can see such stuff?

As you probably know, the Mars rover Curiosity includes, among its impressive onboard chemical-analysis instruments, a powerful laser. The idea is to focus in on small pebbles here and there on the Red Planet’s surface; from a distance of a few meters, the laser can zap a spot on a pebble very briefly, but strongly enough that it heats up, emitting gases and tiny particles whose chemical spectra can then be analyzed.

The JPL/NASA team announced early this past weekend that they’d singled out the first target for testing, a tiny little pyramid of basalt at first simply numbered N165… and, shortly, renamed Coronation. The scheduled moment of zapping was Sunday.

Of course, as with any public event, this one brought the Internet wags out in force. Of particular interest at the moment is the Twitter feed of a user named N165 aka Coronation. The first few tweets went up on Saturday (read from the bottom up):

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I Am Curious… Rock