NASA's Mars rover Curiosity just climbed its steepest Red Planet slope to date, after snapping a nice selfie that gives us a better appreciation of the achievement.

("Oppy" landed a few weeks after its twin, Spirit, in January 2004 and was declared dead in February 2019, though it last communicated with Earth in June 2018, just before a huge dust storm engulfed the rover.)

Mission team members stitched together 86 of these photos to make a mosaic selfie, which gives the lay of the Martian land and also shows a drill hole Curiosity made to sample and study some rock.

Curiosity landed inside Mars' 96-mile-wide (154 km) Gale Crater in August 2012, on a $2.5 billion mission to determine if the area could ever have supported microbial life.

The car-size robot quickly determined that Gale supported a potentially habitable lake-and-stream system in the ancient past and that this environment persisted for long stretches — perhaps millions of years at a time .

Curiosity is still going strong, reading Mount Sharp's rock layers for clues about how, why and when Mars transitioned from a relatively warm and wet world long ago to the cold, dry planet it is today.