While Sipping Sand, Curiosity Has Time to Snap Gorgeous Panorama of Mars

Curiosity is busy analyzing sand samples that it's been scooping for the past couple of weeks, but it’s not sitting idly still while this takes place.

Well, it is sitting still, but its mast camera is not, the rover has been snapping panoramic photos of its surroundings, providing us with more views of the "alien" Martian landscape.

On Sol 64 and Sol 66, Curiosity got out its Mastcam 100 and snapped hundreds of photos of itself (with the left camera) and a few of its surroundings.

NASA pieced together the raw images to come up with the panoramic view you see above, but the plan goes beyond just providing you with something pretty to look at, NASA needs all these images, to figure out where to go next and how to get there, once it's done with the sand analysis at Rocknest.