Eye-Popping Interactive Panorama from the Curiosity Rover

There’s an incredible new interactive panorama from the latest Curiosity rover’s self-portrait and surroundings at the “John Klein” drilling site. It was put together by photographer Andrew Bodrov and combines the recent self-portrait and other images to create a full 360-degree panorama created from hundreds of images. The mosaic stretches about 30,000 pixels width.

Click here to see (and go play with) the panorama.

The pan includes the self-portrait, which consists of 66 different images (seen above) taken by the rover’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) during the 177th Martian sol, of Curiosity’s work on Mars (Feb. 3, 2013 here on Earth), along with 113 images taken on Sol 170 and an additional 17 images taken on Sol 176.

Here’s the full pan in a non-interactive view:

In the pan, you can see the holes in the rock named John Klein — in memory of a Mars Science Laboratory deputy project manager who died in 2011. The historic first drilling took place on Feb. 8, 2013, and by zooming around and in, you can also see the weird little shiny protuberance we’ve been talking about (look for the pile of rocks to the right of the rover.)

Bodrov is a photographer from Estonia who specializes in interactive panoramic photography. He did a previous Curiosity pan in August 2012 and he’s also taken lots of images at the Baikonur Cosmodrome.