The rover took the image, the fifth time since landing in February 2021 - between stops investigating the Martian surface.

A selfie was taken on May 10, marking its 1,500th Saul (Mars Day) Exploring the Red Planet, a Mars Dust played by NASA's perseverance Mars rover. At the time, the six-wheeled rover was parked in an area nicknamed "Witch Hazelnuts", an area on the edge of Jezero Crater that has been exploring for the past five months.

“The self-portrait of the Witch Hazel area enjoys the beauty of the terrain and the roamer’s hardware,” said Justin Maki, a leader in perseverance imaging at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "The bright scenes and relatively clear atmosphere allow us to capture the dust devil 3 miles north of Neretva Vallis."

The selfie also provides the engineering team with an opportunity to view and evaluate the status of the rovers, their tools, and overall dust accumulation when the durability reaches the 1,500 Sol milestone. (The day on Mars is 24.6 hours, so 1,500 sols equals 1,541 Earth days.)

When taking selfies, bright lights illuminate the scene, provided by the high angle of the sun, illuminating the deck of perseverance and casting its shadow under and behind the chassis. Immediately in front of the rover is the "Bell Island" drilling, the latest sampling location in the Witch Hazel Hill area.

This is the latest selfie since the mission began, the fifth of Perseverance, stitched together in a series of 59 images collected by Watson at the end of the robot’s arm, a wide-angle terrain sensor for operation and engineering. It shows the remote sensing mast of the rover, looking at the camera. To generate a selfie version, looking at the drill with the mast, Watson took three more images focusing on the redirected mast.

“To get a selfie look, each Watson image has to have its own unique vision,” said Megan Wu, a perseverance imaging scientist at Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego. "That means we have to do precise movements of 62 robot arms. The whole process takes about an hour, but it's worth it. Letting the dust devil in the background make it a classic. It's a great shot."

The dust covering the rover is visual evidence of the journey of the mobile station on Mars: when the image was captured, perseverance had worn out and analyzed 37 rocks and boulders, whose scientific instruments collected 26 rocks (25 rock cores (25 seals and 1 unsealed) and traveled over 22 miles (36 kilometers).

“After 1,500 sols, we may be a little dusty, but our beauty is deeper than deeper in our skin,” said Art Thompson, JPL Perseverance project manager. “Our multiple radioactive thermoelectric generators give us all the strength we need. All our systems and subsystems are in green and click-by-click, our amazing instruments continue to provide data that will provide scientific discoveries in the coming years.”

The rover is currently exploring along the western edge of the Jezero Crater, what the scientific team calls “Krokodillen”.

DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
818-393-9011
agle@jpl.nasa.gov

Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov

2025-073