The Arm Missing From Curiosity's Mars Selfie
The Curiosity rover's selfie at the south rim of Vera Rubin Ridge is a composite, and the giveaway is what has been taken out of it. Frames containing the imager's arm have been edited out, so the arm holding the camera — the one piece of hardware that cannot appear in a picture it takes — simply isn't there. The background is a second assembly. The extended background in the panorama was taken by the rover's Mastcam on sol 1903, while the selfie itself was recorded on sol 1943. Two different moments on Mars, stitched into an image that reads as a single instant.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
So the selfie is a small fiction: the rover is shown standing in a scene assembled from two different sols.
It's a composite, not a fake. Curiosity was there on the ridge; the arm is just the camera's blind spot.
The missing arm is the honest part. Choosing a background from an earlier sol is the artistic one.