While Curiosity recently shared the latest of several selfies captured over the years, NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover should not have been surpassed, and in its very first selfie, it decided to share the spotlight with the Ingenuity drone.
As Digital trends reportedly, Perseverance took the selfie with the Ingenuity helicopter drone about 13 feet from the body of the rover. Perseverance captured the photo using one of the robot arms. The photo was taken from 62 images taken by Perseverance’s WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) camera on the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) instrument, located at the end of the robot se arm. In this case, think of that long arm as a selfie stick.
The 62 images were returned to the investigation, where NASA tied them together in the completed images below. NASA says the images were taken in sequence while the rover was looking at the drone and then again while looking at the camera. The finished striped images come together in these beautifully massive 112-megapixel photos:
To give an idea of how big the two photos are, NASA shared this selfie shot that is 4180 x 2350 pixels in size, just a small portion of the giant image of 12,341 x 9,076 pixels. The full resolution files can be downloaded here.
In addition to the frames above, NASA has also put together a poison to show how the Perseverance Rover’s “head” moves back and forth between looking at Ingenuity and into the lens of the selfie camera.
Two collisions, one selfie. Greetings from the Jezero Crater, where I took my first selfie of the mission. I also look at the #MarsHelicopter Ingenious as it is ready for its first flight within a few days. Indeed, daring things.
Images: https://t.co/owLX2LaK52 pic.twitter.com/rTxDNK69rs
– NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) 7 April 2021
If it’s hard to imagine NASA robbers taking selfies, the organization has outlined them here as well as in the videos below.
These new selfie photos come after Perseverance Ingenuity successfully deployed from its position under the rover ahead of a test flight that was to take place earlier this month. Before this stage, Perseverance first had to drive to the ‘airport’ where Ingenuity would be charged so that it could charge its solar battery.
Now that it has been deployed, it has 30 March days (31 Earth Days) to run its test flights.
As can be imagined, flying a camera drone on Mars is no easy task. According to NASA, the Red Planet not only has less gravity than Earth (about one-third of the amount), but the atmosphere is only 1% as dense. Look for more information on what NASA is doing before the monumental task PetaPixel’s earlier coverage here.