NASA shares Perseverance selfie with its Ingenuity helicopter

NASA shares Perseverance selfie with its Ingenuity helicopter on Mars

The Perseverance Mars rover from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has clicked a selfie on the red planet using its onboard camera called WATSON that is attached to the end of its robotic arm. in a blog post For Mars Exploration Program, NASA Science shares that as many as 62 individual images were joined together to get this selfie of the rover with its little robotic Ingenuity helicopter. The image was shared on Twitter, the official administrator of NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover said that the image that is the first selfie of the mission was taken in the Jezero crater. The rover is also keeping an eye on the engine as the helicopter prepares for its first flight. When closing the tweet, the official account said: “Really daring powerful things.”

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took a selfie with the Ingenuity helicopter. Image credit: NASA.

Recently, another of NASA’s Mars rovers, Curiosity, shared a panoramic selfie with a majestic rock formation on Mars, known as Mont Mercou. The image was created from 60 individual images. This was taken on March 26, 2021, Martian day 3070 (sun), from the Curiosity mission to Mars by two cameras on the rover.

The Ingenuity helicopter weighs just 1.8kg and can be seen at a distance of four meters from the rover in the selfie. Both the Perseverance and Ingenuity rovers landed on Mars on February 18. Their selfie was clicked together on April 6, according to the blog post. A camera called WATSON or Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and Engineering and SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) were used to capture the images.

Ingenuity’s maiden flight was first scheduled on April 12 but must push back to April 14 due to technical problems with the helicopter rotors. During its maiden flight, the rover will send instructions from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to the helicopter. After the first flight occurs, using the Mastcam-Z and navigation cameras, the Perseverance rover will possibly download images, videos, and engineering data from Ingenuity. Using this data, the Ingenuity team will be able to determine whether the device’s first flight to Mars was a success or not.

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