Ever Wondered How NASA Perseverance Rover Takes Selfies on Mars?

The agency released a clip in which some light is shed on how the rover snaps pictures on Mars. The iconic duo selfie in which we can see Ingenuity a little bit further back from Perseverance was taken on April 6th. The color video from the rover shows how it captured the historical image.

Equipping Perseverance with instruments that allow it to take selfies isn't just for documenting historic moments on the Red Planet, but they actually serve a crucial role: they allow engineers to check wear and tear on the rover. To construct the final image, Perseverance's robotic arm twisted and maneuvered to take up to 62 photographs using its WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) camera.

WATSON was specially designed for snapping close-up detail pictures of rock textures rather than wide-angle images. And because each WATSON image only covers a small section of the landscape, engineers had to command the rover to take multiple individual photos.

Behind the selfie were 10 pairs of working hands, including rover drivers, engineers who ran tests at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and camera operations engineers who developed the camera sequence, processed the images, and stitched them together. It was a massive effort that took the team of specialists around a week to put everything together.

"The thing that took the most attention was getting Ingenuity into the right place in the selfie," said Mike Ravine, Advanced Projects Manager at Malin Space Science Systems. "Given how small it is, I thought we did a pretty good job."

Indeed, the mosaic of pictures taken on April 6th were combined in one stunning image that made history on Mars.