In a remarkable and wholly unexpected gift to Curiosity fans, the rover has just taken the first-ever color Mastcam self-portrait from Mars. To date, all of Curiosity's previous self-portraits have been taken with MAHLI, the camera at the end of the robotic arm. Mastcam is also capable of imaging the rover, but has always avoided the rover deck, except for isolated images taken to document the condition of instruments located on the deck. With Curiosity's arrival at the lee side of an active Martian sand dune, there is finally a scientific reason to include the deck in a Mastcam panorama: to look for grains of sand that have blown onto the rover from the dune. This panorama is part of a "before" observation; they'll take more images (of a more limited area) as one or more "after" observations.

Andrew Bodrov has already assembled the lovely panorama, and made a full 360-degree virtual reality version. Here's a low-resolution screen capture, but definitely visit Bodrov's 360cities page to see the full VR version.