Perseverance is noticeable in this selfie which also contains the Ingenuity Mars helicopter.
NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
The Perseverance Rover was taking pictures of himself (including this charming look on his “face”), but now we have the full view. NASA on Wednesday released a glorious, full-body selfie showing the rover with its Mars companion, the Ingenuity helicopter.
The image highlights the rover, which still looks pretty clean after the mid-February touch, and the small experimental helicopter Ingenuity. The helicopter is preparing to make its first test flight no earlier than Sunday.
The Rover uses the Watson camera mounted on its robot arm to capture the 62 images used for the selfie. The marathon that clipped in the photo took place on April 6th. To get a sense of scale, the helicopter is located about 4 meters from its companion on wheels.
The The throughput team tweeted a slightly different version of the selfie in GIF form showing how the rover’s “head” moves from looking at Ingenuity to the camera.
The rover unloaded the Ingenuity helicopter the weekend on the ground and will watch the daring rotor craft attempt to make the first powered, controlled flight on another planet. NASA hopes to receive images of the flight along with engineering data on the performance of the rotorcraft.
The selfie is a fitting tribute to two machines doing groundbreaking work on Mars.
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