CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The newest selfie by NASA’s Perseverance rover at Mars has captured an surprising visitor: a Martian mud satan.
Resembling a small pale puff, the twirling mud satan popped up 3 miles (5 kilometers) behind the rover throughout this month’s picture shoot. Launched Wednesday, the selfie is a composite of 59 pictures taken by the digital camera on the top of the rover’s robotic arm, in keeping with NASA.
It took an hour to carry out all of the arm actions essential to collect the photographs, “nevertheless it’s value it,” stated Megan Wu, an imaging scientist from Malin Area Science Methods, which constructed the digital camera.
“Having the mud satan within the background makes it a basic,” Wu stated in a press release.
The image — which additionally reveals the rover’s newest pattern borehole on the floor — marks 1,500 sols or Martian days for Perseverance. That’s equal to 1,541 days on Earth.
Perseverance is roofed with crimson mud, the results of drilling into dozens of rocks. Launched in 2020, it’s gathering samples for eventual return to Earth from Jezero Crater, an historic lakebed and river delta that might maintain clues of any previous microbial life.
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