NASA's Curiosity rover climbs steepest terrain in his life; takes a selfie on Mars

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover recently set a record for climbing the steepest terrain it has ever climbed on the red planet. After reaching the top, it also took a ‘selfie’ and captured the panoramic view of GreenHeugh Pediment -- a broadsheet of rock that sits atop a hill on the material surface below. The million-dollar rover's mission is to study whether the Martian environment could have supported microbial life billions of years ago.

'360-degree Panorama'

The selfie was posted by NASA on March 24 on Instagram. Explaining the picture, the American space agency revealed that it was taken using a camera called Mars Hand Lens Imager adding that the picture was constructed by stitching multiple individual frames.

“This selfie is a 360-degree panorama comprised of 86 images relayed to Earth" the post read. The selfie captures the rover about 11 feet below the point where it climbed onto the crumbling pediment.

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Since 2014, the Curiosity rover has been rolling up on the Mount Sharp, a five-km tail mountain at the centre of Gale Crater. Before the climb, Curiosity used the black-and-white Navigation Cameras located on its mast, for the first time, to record a short movie of its 'selfie stick', otherwise known as its robotic arm.

The Curiosity rover landed on Mars in 2012, and since then has been exploring the red planet's Gale Crater. The rover has captured several pictures of Mars while studying its rock profile to find signs of any life ever sustained on the planet. The picture captures is termed to be the Rocky Martian Prison.

The rover is heading towards the slope of rock debris which is called  'Central Butte', located at the foot of Aeolis Mons which is a mountain at Gale’s centre. The eerie pictures were captured on November 3 by Curiosity's Right Navigation Camera also called the 'Sol 2573' by NASA experts.

(Image Credits: Instagram/ NASA)

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