NASA's Perseverance rover took a selfie next to the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars on Tuesday, like a friend informing the group chat that they've arrived safely at their holiday spot.
Perseverance's mast camera (also known as the head) is staring at the camera and then back at Ingenuity in a two-frame animation posted on Wednesday. On the 293-million-mile journey from Earth, Ingenuity was tied to Perseverance's underside and successfully deployed onto the Martian soil on Saturday.
The selfie was taken with WATSON, a gadget on Perseverance's extendable arm. In a nod to the popular fictional detective couple, the Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering is connected to the SHERLOC instrument. Though WATSON wasn't built for selfies, it turned out beautifully here.
This was a bit more difficult to build than the selfies we take on our tablets. The image is made up of 62 WATSON-taken photographs that have been stitched together. It's a similar mechanism to the selfie taken by NASA's Curiosity rover in 2018.
Perseverance's Ingenuity helicopter is putting its devices through their paces ahead of its first flight attempt on Mars in April. Perseverance, on the other hand, is moving out of the way for its own protection.
Expect more photos detailing this interplanetary journey as Ingenuity puts her skills to the test and Perseverance discovers the Jezero Crater, a stretch of Mars that was once home to a river delta.
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