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NASA’s Perseverance rover has brought “family portrait” bumper sticker fashion to a whole new world.
Raw footage of the Perseverance rover, which landed safely on the surface of Mars last Thursday (February 18), revealed a small plaque depicting a range of small spacecraft.
At first glance, the little white decals may look like pixelated cats walking on the rover’s deck. But on closer inspection, the symbols seem to represent all of the NASA missions to Mars that have reached the surface of the Red Planet.
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The rovers are lined up in the same order they landed on the Red Planet: the Sojourner rover (1997), the Mars Exploration twin Rovers Spirit and Opportunity (2004), the Curiosity rover (2012) and Perseverance.
Also included is the Ingenuity helicopter, which has hitchhiked on Mars with Perseverance and will be the first to attempt to fly to another planet.
Moogega Cooper, chief planetary protection engineer for the Perseverance rover, tweeted a photo of the family portrait just before it was attached to the rover at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where the rover was built.
Now that it’s out, here’s a pic of the family portrait just before it was bolted! (For those wondering if it was biologically clean, yes … yes it was!). # Mars2020 pic.twitter.com/GSTfA896tQFebruary 22, 2021
The dozens of other landers that other space agencies have sent to Mars, or the Chinese rover Tianwen-1, which is expected to land on the Red Planet this summer, are not pictured in the family portrait.
Email Hanneke Weitering at [email protected] or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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