NASA’s Perseverance Rover has taken the “family portrait” craze to a new world.
Raw images of the Perseverance rover, which landed safely on the surface of Mars last Thursday (February 18), showed a small commemorative plaque with a series of small spacecraft.
At first glance, the little white stickers may look like cats with a pixel marching across the deck of the Rover. But on closer inspection, it appears that the symbols represent all of Mars’ NASA missions that made it to the surface of the Red Planet.
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The rovers were lined up in the same order that they landed on the Red Planet: the Sojourner rover (1997), the twin Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity (2004), the Curiosity rover (2012) and Perseverance.
The Ingenuity helicopter was also included, which traveled to Mars with perseverance and will be the first to attempt to fly on another planet.
Moogega Cooper, planetary protection leader for the Perseverance Rover, tweeted a photo of the family portrait just before it was attached to the Rover at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where the Rover was built.
Now that it’s out, here’s a photo of the family portrait just before it’s bolted down! (For those wondering if it was biologically clean, yes … yes it was!). # Mars2020 pic.twitter.com/GSTfA896tQ22 February 2021
The dozens of other landers sent by other space agencies to Mars, or China’s Tianwen-1 rover, which is scheduled to land on the Red Planet this summer, are not featured in the family portrait.
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