This is perfect for Curiosity’s Facebook photo:
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
What the picture shows:
The mosaic shows the rover at “Rocknest,” the spot in Gale Crater where the mission’s first scoop sampling took place. Four scoop scars can be seen in the regolith in front of the rover. A fifth scoop was collected later.
The base of Gale Crater’s 3-mile-high (5-kilometer) sedimentary mountain, Mount Sharp, rises on the horizon in the right half of the mosaic. Mountains in the background to the left are the northern wall of Gale Crater. The Martian landscape and the turret on the rover’s arm appear inverted within the round, reflective ChemCam instrument at the top of the rover’s mast.
The rover’s robotic arm is not visible in the mosaic. MAHLI, which took the component images for this mosaic, is mounted on a turret at the end of the arm. Wrist motions and turret rotations on the arm allowed MAHLI to acquire the mosaic’s component images. The arm was positioned out of the shot in the images or portions of images used in the mosaic. An animation of the complex choreography the arm used for positioning the camera to take each of the images is at http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=156880341 .
