NASA's Curiosity Rover takes a 360 degree selfie on Mars mountain

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NASA's Curiosity Rover takes a 360 degree selfie on Mars mountain
NASA's Curiosity Rover takes a 360 degree selfie on Mars mountain

New Delhi : NASA's Curiosity rover took a stunning selfie on a Mars mountain which happens to be the steepest climb the robot has taken till date. It captured the scene just below ‘Greenheugh pediment which is a broad sheet of rock that sits atop a hill. In front of the rover is a hole it drilled while sampling a bedrock target called "Hutton."

The selfie has been clicked in a way that it brings a 360-degree panaromic view of the site, NASA said in a statement on Saturday.

The selfie captures the rover about 11 feet below the point where it climbed onto the crumbling pediment. Since 2014, Curiosity has been rolling up Mount Sharp, a five-km tail mountain at the center of Gale Crater.

"Rover operators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California carefully map out each drive to make sure Curiosity will be safe," said NASA.

Before the climb, Curiosity used the black-and-white Navigation Cameras located on its mast to, for the first time, record a short movie of its "selfie stick," otherwise known as its robotic arm.

"We get asked so often how Curiosity takes a selfie," said Doug Ellison, a Curiosity camera operator at JPL. "We thought the best way to explain it would be to let the rover show everyone from its own point of view just how it's done".

The aim of the mission is to study the environment on the Red planet which may had contained the microbial life billions of years ago.