Since August 2012 when NASA’s car-sized spacecraft named Curiosity rover that has been exploring Mars in an exotic location has taken a selfie.
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NASA’s Curiosity rover was not successful from the moment it arrived on Mars in 2012, it has driven more than 10 kilometers.
The following have been exploring:-
- Still, Curiosity wasn’t so busy to stop for a selfie, the existence of the ancient lakes on Mars and Martian geology that collected data which is invaluable for the future missions.
- Selfie from NASA was taken on Sol 1228 on Mars; where the Martian day was longer than Earth. This region was known as Bagnold Dune Field.
- Behind the Bagnold Dune Field, there was a background structure known as Namib Dune.
- Curiosity used its wheels to loosen sand when it wasn’t taking selfies, from the background Namib Dune which was then scoped for analysis.
- The images were 57 in number all together taken of the Namib Dune which was taken on January 19 via the Curiosity rover.
- At the time of taking a selfie, the rover managed to take three different samples of the Dune.
- Curiosity started to explore sand dunes last year December 2015 on mars when it entered the Bagnold dune.
- In the past images of the rover, arms were not used to position the camera, the reason is the image is actually a mosaic of more than 50 individual photos.
- The images were taken from Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) which was a true colour camera with a resolution of 1600×1200 which is roughly 2 megapixels.
- It was not a very high resolution and wasn’t even back when Curiosity was built.
- However, combining all the smaller images with MAHLI that allowed NASA to crop out the final image and obtain a resolution of 5623×6000.