NASA's Curiosity rover beams home a selfie from a Martian sand dune
NASA's Curiosity rover is checking out some sand dunes on Mars, and like any good traveler in an exotic locale, it has a selfie to prove it.
The car-sized spacecraft that has been exploring Mars since August 2012, sent this selfie back to Earth showing what the intrepid Mars rover looked like in front of the Namib Dune on Jan. 19. The image combines a series of 57 photos taken by Curiosity that day on Mars.
Curiosity has been exploring Martian sand dunes -- the first active extraterrestrial sand dunes ever studied from close range -- since December 2015, when it arrived at the Bagnold dune field.
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"Images taken from orbit have shown that dunes in the Bagnold field move as much as about 3 feet (1 meter) per Earth year," NASA said in a statement.
Curiosity actually sampled a bit of the dune to learn more about the dust grains on Mars.
The rover scooped up a bit of the dune three different times around the time it took this selfie, but getting those samples wasn't easy.
"It was pretty challenging to drive into the sloping sand and then turn on the sand into the position that was the best to study the dunes," Michael McHenry of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in an earlier statement.
Curiosity also had some trouble processing the third sample. Engineers working with the rover are running some off-world diagnostics to try to figure out what the problem was, but that doesn't mean the rover has a lot of time off.
Curiosity will keep investigating the dune fields from its post near the Namib Dune, keeping an eye out for any wind that could move grains of sand to one place to another.
These kinds of observations will allow scientists to learn more about the speed and direction of the wind on Mars, NASA said.
While Curiosity's self portraits are cute, they also give scientists a good idea of how the rover is faring as it moves around the harsh Martian terrain. Scientists can use the images of the rover's hardware to check out any wear and tear.
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Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
