I'm sure many of you
heard about the Mars Science Laboratory: Curiosity in the news back in August.
The rover successfully survived the trip and descent to Mars, landing safely in
the early morning hours on August 6th (EST). Much of the scientific community
was fretting about Curiosity surviving the landing due to all of the creative
engineering maneuvers that needed to go of without a hitch for the rover to
survive. Thankfully everything went smoothly and we are now beginning to study
the Martian surface! A young girl, who has seen many of the photos the rover
has taken, asked me why it keeps taking self portraits. "Why not point the
camera at the Martian surface?" she asked. "We already know what the
rover looks like. It's almost like he's taking a picture of himself for
Facebook!" There is good reason for
Curiosity to take pictures of itself, and that is to make sure that everything
is functioning properly. We want to make sure that nothing broke during
Curiosity's trip, and we also need to make sure that camera, levers, wheels,
etc. are all working as they should. Once we trust that everything is working
properly, we can start to move the rover and do experiments. So we expect to
see many more close ups of Curiosity on Mars, just as a sort of
"check-up". Below is an image of almost the entire rover sitting on
the Martian surface. Everything looks good to me!
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
