Back in April, Ingenuity’s ingenuity of NASA captured the imagination of the world when he returned an epic selfie that he took in ingenuity on the surface of March. It turns out, capturing that the photo was not so easy as perseverance poses, taking a unique photo and calling it a day. According to a new NASA video published on Friday, what we had to see here the earth was the result of 62 separate images that the agency sews together.
The way NASA tells him, the process has been complicated and takes a lot of time. This involved a dozen experts, including a variety of engineers, withdraw everything, and about a week to browse all the orders they had to send to perseverance so that the end shooting occurs. The reason it took 62 images to produce the final photo was that NASA used the Watson Camera of Perseverance for the composition. The instrument was mainly designed to take close-up images of rocks, no great wide-angle planes. Since Watson has been mounted on the robotic arm of perseverance, NASA should also ensure that Appendix has not hit the rover while positioning the camera.
To this end, NASA engineers have developed software that has allowed them to simulate every arm movement so that they can get it as close as possible from the rover without damaging it. They also directed simulations to understand how to position the ingenuity in the composition. “The thing that has taken the most attention was to be of ingenuity in the right selfie”, said Mike Ravine of the science-spy system (MSSS), which built the NASA camera used to capture The selfie. “Given how little it’s, I thought we did a good job.”
Once NASA had all the images needed for selfie engineers, SMSS engineers continued to clean each individual to eliminate the imperfections left by the dust that had settled on the Watson light detector. They then sewed them together in a mosaic before cropping and distorting this image in the one we all know and love today.