What do you mean?

by roland , Monday, July 29, 2013, 13:02 (4146 days ago) @ Xenos

I actually wondered if that's what he meant, but if it is he posted and quoted the wrong message *shrugs* I guess we'l never know... since we couldn't ask General Vagueness, that would just be ridiculous.

:) Well, since you're curious...

Curiosity's arm is about 2 meters long, so when it's stretched out in front of the rover and the camera is pointed backward (like taking a selfie) you can see either some of the rover, the surrounding terrain, or both in each image. The arm "poses" were designed so that the arm itself could be digitally removed from the final mosaic because the underlying terrain would be imaged from all the various camera angles. After all the images were taken they were stitched together and geometrically warped so you could see the whole rover exactly as she would look (minus the big arm sticking out) in her parking spot on Mars (a place called Yellowknife Bay where we drilled the first two holes into the surface of another planet).

But don't just take my word for it. National Geographic ran a story that explains the whole thing and even includes a movie that shows a simulation of how the rover acquired all the pictures.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/121204-curiosity-mars-rover-portrait-science-space/