Mars dust devil enters the selfie without clearance
A Mars dust devil photobombed Perseverance during its 1,500-sol selfie. The whirlwind stood about five kilometres away, yet still found the exact patch of background reserved for personal branding.
The rover took 59 separate images with its WATSON camera. Engineers then stitched them together on Earth. Therefore, this selfie required more production work than most celebrity memoirs.
Meanwhile, the finished picture also shows the Bell Island sample borehole. It is a small dark mark in the rock and the scientific equivalent of leaving the restaurant receipt visible in a holiday photo.
“We asked the weather to respect the closed set,” said Miranda Shutterbug, Head of Extraterrestrial Influencing. “It replied by rotating warm air with excellent comic timing.”
The rover’s robotic arm does not appear in the final image. Just like human selfie-takers, the team kept the arm out of frame. Unlike humans, they needed 59 photographs and several million kilometres of signal delay to achieve it.
At the Martian Bureau of Image Rights, the dust devil demanded a credit, a trailer and approval over all future captions. However, it disappeared before signing the release.
Finally, Perseverance celebrated 1,500 days of serious exploration with a photograph nobody could entirely control. It may be the most human achievement yet recorded by a nuclear-powered robot.
Read the real story: NASA’s photojournal entry on the Mars dust devil selfie.
