Curiosity’s Dusty Selfie at Duluth

A self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows the robot at a drilled sample site called "Duluth" on the lower slopes of Mount Sharp. A Martian dust storm reduced sunlight and visibility in Gale Crater. The north-northeast wall and rim of the crater lie beyond the rover, their visibility obscured by atmospheric dust.

This mosaic combines multiple images taken with the rover's arm-mounted Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on June 15, 2018, on the 2,082nd Martian day, or sol, of the rover's work on the Red Planet.

"Duluth" was the first rock sample captured by the rover's drill since October 2016. A mechanical issue took the drill offline in December 2016. On May 20, 2018, a new technique, called Feed Extended Drilling (FED) was used to steady the drill against Martian rocks.

For scale, the rover's wheels are 20 inches (50 centimeters) in diameter and about 16 inches (40 centimeters) wide. The drill hole is about 0.6 inches (1.6 centimeters) in diameter.

The rover self-portrait view from stitching together multiple MAHLI images does not include the rover's 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, that were used in this mosaic. This process was used previously in acquiring and assembling Curiosity self-portraits taken at sample-collection sites, including "Bagnold Dune Field," "Rocknest," "Windjana," "Buckskin" and "Okoruso."

MAHLI was built by Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed and built the project's Curiosity rover.

Additional information about Curiosity is online at http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.nasa.gov/msl/ .