sol 1500 Selfie assembled from 6 overlapping Watson images
this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover
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Paul, do you by chance know why they took those WATSON images of the mast facing downward before they started shooting the selfie?
https://lemmy.world/u/SpecialSetOfSieves
In recent times it has become a fairly common occurrence when taking selfies to take an addition set of images with the mast head looking down. That way they can create a pair of selfies. Then use the 2 selfies to create an animated GIF for use in an outreach press release. See examples below eg. When it looked at the helicopter. In the sol 1500 selfie I believe it is looking at the sample hole it just drilled. If I'm right we'll see the animation of the rover in the JPL photojournal in the coming days after all the images are down
Looking down Examples:
https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA26344
https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA25681
https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA24836
https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA24542
I have nothing to add to your excellent, well-sourced and comprehensive reply, save this:
If the budget cuts do end up harming US (and int'l) research funding as much as some people clearly want them to, NASA and the science community has every right to use the "downward facing" shot to represent Percy being sad. And even sad Percy is more popular than the people behind these cuts.
Those four selfies that Paul links to above all represent significant mission milestones - the deployment of Ingenuity, our first sampling attempt, our finding of a "potential biosignature" down in the valley, and the rover at the sample depot.
Perhaps this latest one can be labeled "Perseverance's Pre-Budget Cut Selfie".