Panoramic View From West of 'Dingo Gap' . photonado

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Panoramic View From West of 'Dingo Gap'

This scene looking back at where Curiosity crossed a dune at "Dingo Gap" combines several exposures taken by the Navigation Camera (Navcam) high on the rover's mast. The panorama is centered toward the east and spans about 225 degrees, from north-northwest at the left to west-southwest at the right. For scale, the distance between Curiosity's parallel wheel tracks is about 9 feet (2.7 meters). The panorama is presented here as a cylindrical projection. The component images were taken during the 539th Martian day, or sol, of the rover's work on Mars (Feb. 10, 2014) from a location reached by a drive the preceding sol. Curiosity crossed the dune at Dingo Gap, near the middle of the horizon of this scene, on Sol 535 (Feb. 6, 2014). The dune is about 3 feet (1 meter) tall. The high-mounted cylinder on the rear part of the vehicle is the rover's UHF (ultrahigh frequency) antenna. The set of disks mounted below it is part of the calibration target for Curiosity's Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument. The ball-on-a-stick device in the foreground is the calibration target, including a sundial, for Curiosity's Mast Camera (Mastcam). To the right of the UHF antenna in this image are the radiator fins for Curiosity's power supply, a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed and built the project's Curiosity rover and the rover's Navcam. More information about Curiosity is online at http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ .

Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Image released by NASA on 2014-02-27 as catalog id PIA17950