Big kudos to the folks at Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the continued success of their Mars rover programs. Curiosity has been performing flawlessly since landing in Gale Crater back in August.

As mentioned in an earlier PCB007 article (June 2008) I had a very small part in creating the flex circuits for Curiosity – creating trace layouts for about a dozen flex circuits and checking gerber files for most of the flex circuits in the rover. It was great fun to be part of such an ambitious program, but I never got to actually see the flex circuits themselves. What a pleasant surprise to find the pictures that Curiosity is sending back are so good you can see the flex circuits!

In October the mission used the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), which is the camera out on the very end of the robot arm, to capture a set of 55 high-resolution images, which were stitched together to create a high-resolution full-color self-portrait.