Nasa's Curiosity rover takes a spectacular close-up selfie on Mars: 'I'm back! Did you miss me?'

Apart from working on Mars and analysing its chemistry, Nasa's Curiosity rover takes out time to capture the beauty of the Red Planet. And every now and then, it sends back images that tell us a new story about the planet or its early history. But this time, the crawling machine was up to something different.

On 23 January 2018, when President Trump signed the bill to end the government shutdown, Curiosity's brief silence on Twitter came to an end. The rover was back online and it celebrated the return with a new batch of images and a sweet Martian selfie.

"I'm back! Did you miss me? This selfie is part of a fresh batch of images, direct from #Mars," the Curiosity's twitter team wrote while sharing the amazing selfie.

Curiosity has taken selfies in the past as part of its normal photography routine, but all those images were distant wide-angled shots, CNET reported. This one, however, the image gives us an opportunity to check out the rover and its technology up close.

The rover landed on the planet in 2012 and since then, it has been crawling around, doing as much science as possible. In last six years, its wheels suffered damage but the technology still looks good, at least from the outside.

As the report points out, the latest selfie, taken by Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager, encompasses several crucial pieces of technology it uses. The circular part at the top is the ChemCam system which analyses rock surfaces, while the two square boxes just under it are the left and right Mastcams. The pair of lenses stacked next to both of these cameras are the navigational shooters.

You can check the entire batch of latest images here. These are raw shots and are captured upside down.