In April, the NASA Ingenio Rover captured the world’s imagination when he sent an epic selfie he took with the ingenuity on the surface of Mars. It turns out that the capture of that photo was not as easy as the presentation of perseverance, he taking a single photo and called him a day. According to a new NASA video released on Friday, what we could see here on Earth was the result of 62 separate images, the agency sewed together.
The way NASA says, the process was complicated and consumer of time. He participates in a dozen experts, including a variety of engineers, to take out everything, and about a week to trace all the commands that had to send to perseverance to occur the final shot. The reason why he took 62 images to produce the final photo was because the Watson Chamber of Perseverance used NASA for composition. The instrument was designed primarily to take close-up images of rocks, not expansive shots of wide angle. Since Watson is mounted on Perseverance’s robotic arm, NASA also had to take care of himself, the Appendix did not get into the Rover as he positioned the camera.
For that purpose, NASA engineers developed software that allowed them to simulate each movement of the arm so that they could get it as close as possible from the Rover without damaging it. Simulations were also ran to find out how to position the ingenuity in the composition. “The thing that seized the greatest attention was to get wit in the right place in the selfie,” said Mike Ravine System of Space Sciences of Malin (MSSSS), which built the NASA camera used to capture the selfie. “Given how small it is, I thought we did a good job.”
Once NASA had all the images I needed for the selfie, the MSSS engineers were cleaning each individual to eliminate the spots left by the dust that had settled on the Watson light detector. Then they joined them in a mosaic before cutting and deforming that image in which we all know and love today.