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AssetID: 41608115

Headline: How NASA’s Perseverance Rover Took Its First Selfie

Caption: IN THIS PICTURE: This historic 6 April 2021 image of NASA’s Perseverance Rover beside the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter proved to be one of the most complex selfies ever taken. ... STORY CAPTION: NASA have revealed how the Perseverance Rover took one of the most complex selfies ever taken. Images from NASA’s Perseverance Rover show how the planetary exploration device captured a ‘selfie’ photograph of itself beside the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter on 6 April 2021. The rover’s robotic arm twisted and manoeuvred its WATSON Camera to take 62 images of itself and the helicopter. These were then cleaned up and assembled into a mosaic by MSSS image processing engineers, before they were warped and cropped to create one selfie photograph that looks like it was taken by a normal camera. What the selfie doesn’t capture is how much work went into making it happen. “The thing that took the most attention was getting Ingenuity into the right place in the selfie,” said Mike Ravine, Advanced Projects Manager at MSSS. “Given how small it is, I thought we did a pretty good job.” The pictures also have an important scientific role, as they allow engineers to check wear and tear on the rover. However, they also inspire space enthusiasts - and many rover team members can cite a favourite image that sparked their interest in NASA. “I got into this because I saw a picture from Sojourner, NASA’s first Mars rover,” said Vandi Verma, Perseverance’s chief engineer for robotic operations at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Verma worked as a driver for the agency’s Opportunity and Curiosity rovers, and she helped to create Curiosity’s first selfie, snapped on 31 October, 2012. “When we took that first selfie, we didn’t realise these would become so iconic and routine,” she said.

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