Ask Astro: When Curiosity takes a selfie, where is the shaft that holds the camera?

 When Curiosity takes a selfie, where is the shaft that holds the camera? It is never seen, like the camera was placed on a tripod and a timer set. Was it edited out?

Curiosity took this unique low-angle selfie shortly after drilling a rock called Buckskin. A portion of the rover’s robotic arm is visible (of the three structures that stick up from the top of the rover, it’s the light-colored shaft in the middle), but appears oddly cut off because the rest of the arm was not shown in the many images used to create this mosaic. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Indian Harbour, Nova Scotia

To take a selfie (like the one on pages 24–25 in our September 2022 issue), Curiosity uses the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera on its multijointed robotic arm. The technique is roughly the same as when a human takes a selfie: Curiosity holds out its arm to snap the pic.

There are two reasons why the arm holding the camera is never seen. First, think about how you take a selfie with a phone: You do exactly as the rover does, holding the camera out with your arm extended. Your arm doesn’t appear in the selfie because it is outside the view of the lens (below or behind it). Similarly, in many cases Curiosity’s arm is outside the field of view of the lens

Admittedly, it’s a bit more complicated for a rover to take a selfie than for a human, and this introduces the second reason why the arm is not visible. For us humans, selfies are a one-step process: Snap a pic and we’re done. But Curiosity’s camera can’t capture the entire rover in a single shot, even from the end of its 7-foot-long (2.1 meters) arm. Instead, the rover must take dozens of photos to fit its entire body and background into the view. (This process can take an hour or more!)

To do so, the arm moves around the rover to snap images from many angles. In some of these raw shots, small portions of the arm may be visible due to the angle of the photo. However, the rover takes so many images that when NASA staff on Earth stitch them together into a final, single selfie, they can choose to use only portions of the images that do not include the arm. So yes, in cases where bits of the arm might appear in the image, it has been selectively edited out of the final result.

Hoburg and Bowen started Wednesday readying their spacesuits inside the Quest airlock where they will exit the station into the vacuum of space on Thursday. After lunchtime, the duo organized their spacewalking tools and tethers inside Quest with assistance from NASA Flight Engineer Frank Rubio. Finally, the three NASA astronauts joined Flight Engineer Sultan Alneyadi of UAE (United Arab Emirates) for a final review of the spacewalk procedures and robotics activities necessary to support the solar array installation job.

Two cosmonauts are also getting ready for their own spacewalk scheduled for June 22 for maintenance on the outside of the orbital outpost’s Roscosmos segment. Commander Sergey Prokopyev and Flight Engineer Dmitri Petelin spent Wednesday gathering spacewalking hardware, testing support equipment, and configuring their spacesuit components. The duo will exit the Poisk airlock next Thursday and spend about seven hours replacing communications and science hardware and photographing the condition of the Zvezda service module.

Roscosmos Flight Engineer Andrey Fedyaev started his morning working on life support maintenance tasks. Next, he activated and handed over radiation sensors to Hoburg and Bowen who will wear them on their spacesuits during Thursday’s spacewalk. Fedyaev later exercised on a treadmill as ground specialists monitored real-time video of his workout and hardware operations.

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