It's apparently National Selfie Day. I'm not entirely sure who has the authority to declare these things, or why they decided we needed a National Selfie Day, but since the self-portrait is one of my favorite subgenres of spacecraft photography, I couldn't resist writing about them.

The unequivocal master of self-portraits is Curiosity, an often-anthropomorphized robot that can even take its selfies the way humans do, by regarding itself with a camera held at the end of its own arm. Curiosity takes self-portraits relatively frequently, nearly every time it drills or scoops samples from Mars to deliver to its scientific instruments. Here are six such self-portraits: