A beautiful new photo mosaic shows NASA’s Mars Perseverance and Ingenuity helicopters like you’ve never seen before.
Perseverance keeps an eye on the small helicopter like a provocative parent in the picture, which civil scientist Seán Doran put together from 62 photos taken by the car-sized rover on Tuesday (April 6).
It took a few hours to make the mosaic, which Doran posted today via his Twitter account. @_TheSeaning. He said he put the composite images through a “listening, restoration and exclusive process” before combining them.
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“Then there is a laborious task of correcting exposure differences between images. Then another image processing succeeds in coming to a final look,” Doran told Space.com via email.
NASA also shared a similar view of Perseverance today, calling it a ‘selfie’, showing an animated view of the rover looking at Ingenuity, then at its arm-mounted camera. The mosaic was also built with 62 statues, agencies said.
“NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took a selfie with the Ingenuity helicopter, seen here about 13 meters (4 meters) below in this image from April 6, 2021, the 46th Mars Day, or sol, of the mission,” officials with NASA Laboratory’s Jet Propulsion, which oversees the Perseverance Mission, wrote in an image description.
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The two mosaics capture the run-up to a historic moment in planetary exploration. Mission team members are preparing Ingenuity for its first test flight, which could already take place on Sunday (April 11).
The sortie – the first flight ever powered by a robot in the air of a foreign world – will be followed by a handful of others during a month-long campaign suggesting that space exploration is possible on Mars.
If ingenuity is successful, future Red Planet missions can mostly include helicopters, which NASA officials can explore on their own and explore for themselves.
Ingenuity will not collect any data as the 4-lb. (1.8 kilograms) rotor sport does not contain any scientific instruments. But it will document its flights with a high-resolution camera. And perseverance will also keep an eye on it from a safe distance. There’s even a chance the rover could record audio from Ingenuity’s flights two microphones on board, NASA officials said.
“The focus on the connection between Percy and Ginny was an obvious choice for this composition,” Doran wrote in his email. “It’s very exciting to see new photos from another planet, but this is very special, and I expect the technology demo to be a huge success.”
After Ingenuity’s work is completed, Perseverance will begin to focus seriously on its own scientific mission. The six-wheeled robot will be looking for signs of ancient Mars life and collecting and storing dozens of monsters for future returns to Earth.
This work and Ingenuity’s flights take place on the floor of the 28-kilometer-wide (45-kilometer) Jezero crater, where perseverance and the helicopter landed together on 18 February. Images captured by Mars orbits show that Jezero was a large lake and a river delta billions of years ago.
You can find more of Doran’s image processing work at his Twitter account and so on his YouTube channel.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.