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Today’s Big Mars Mystery: Where Is the Perseverance Rover in This Photo?

If you happen to have some spare time on your hands, and would like to waste it by straining your eyes for minutes on end trying to spot something that’s impossible to spot, then this one is for you: the latest photo coming all the way from Mars, and taken by that feisty little thing called Ingenuity.
Ingenuity snaps a distant photo of Perseverance 8 photos
Photo: NASA/JPL/Caltech
Ingenuity and Perseverance on MarsIngenuity and Perseverance on MarsThe hole drilled in a Martian rock by PerseveranceThe hole drilled in a Martian rock by PerseveranceMastcam-Z instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover shows sample tube inside the coring bitEmpty sample collection tubeNASA's Perseverance rover takes picture of its first drill site
After months of enchanting us with its achievements, we kind of lost track of what the helicopter in doing up there on Mars and, quite frankly, not even the most hardcore NASA fans pay much attention to it anymore.

After all, the thing went up there to prove the planet’s atmosphere can support helicopter flights, and it did its thing, many times over. And you can’t just keep people focused when you keep feeding them the same thing over and over again.

That’s probably why from time to time NASA tries to keep the Ingenuity in the spotlight by pulling all sorts of neat stunts. The latest one involves the Ingenuity, the Perseverance rover that launched it months ago, and a vast expanse of the Jezero Crater.

During the helicopter’s 11th flight, which took place a week ago, the machine’s cameras snapped a photo of the reddish soil of the neighboring planet, with some outcroppings in the distance, on all sides.

Hiding somewhere in the rocks is the Perseverance rover, and NASA dared us all to try and find it. And that we did, for a shameful amount of time, and we were completely unable to spot the rover.

For the sake of the exercise, we dare you to do the same, which will mean you’ll have to zoom in on all over the photo, and getting really annoyed in the process. When tired enough, come back to this piece and read the following instructions.

See the shadow of the Ingenuity at the bottom center of the photo? Draw an imaginary line straight up from there. Once you reach the rock formations at the top center of the photo, drift just slightly to the right. There, the thing that seems like a rather large and a bit shiny boulder, that’s Perseverance. You can see it enlarged in the second photo of the gallery.
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About the author: Daniel Patrascu
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Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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