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NASA's Mars Exploration Program (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
Sol 1500: A Dust Devil Photobombs Perseverance!
The images for panorama obtained by the rover's Watson camera. The mosaic, which stretches about 20,000 pixels width, includes 64 images taken on Sol 1500 (May 10, 2025).
To celebrate her 1,500th Martian day (“Sol”) exploring the red planet, the Perseverance rover used its robotic arm to take a selfie of the rover and the surrounding landscape. But when team members reviewed the photo, they were surprised to find that Perseverance had been photobombed!
As the rover sat at the “Pine Pond” workspace, located on the outer rim of Jezero crater, which it has been exploring for the past several months, the Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering (WATSON) camera on the end of its arm was used to acquire a 59-image mosaic of the rover. This is the fifth “selfie” that Perseverance has acquired since landing on Mars in 2021. The rover’s robotic arm is not visible in the self portrait because — just like a selfie you would take with your own cellphone camera — rover operators make sure not to have the arm get “in the way” of the body of the rover. This is even easier to do on Mars because Perseverance needs to take 59 different images at slightly different arm positions to build up the selfie, and the elbow of the robotic arm is kept out of the way while the images are acquired. You can find more details about the Sol 1500 selfie here, and this YouTube video shows how the rover arm moves when these activities take place.
While snapping away, Perseverance was photobombed by a dust devil in the distance! These are relatively common phenomena both on Mars and in Earth’s desert regions, and form from rising and rotating columns of warm air, which gives the appearance of a dust tornado. Just like many other weather patterns, there is a peak “season” for dust-devil activity, and Jezero crater is in the peak of that season now (late northern spring). The one seen in the selfie is fairly large, about 100 meters, or 328 feet, across. While Perseverance regularly monitors the horizon for dust-devil activity with Navcam movies, this is the first time the WATSON camera on the end of the robotic arm has ever captured an image of a dust devil!
The dark hole in front of the rover, surrounded by gray rock powder created during the drilling process, shows the location of Perseverance’s 26th sample. Nicknamed “Bell Island” after an island near Newfoundland, Canada, this rock sample contains small spherules, thought to have formed by volcanic eruptions or impacts early in Martian history. Later, this ancient rock was uplifted during the impact that formed Jezero crater. Now that the rover has successfully acquired the spherule sample the science team was searching for, Perseverance is leaving the area to explore new rock exposures. Last week, the rover arrived at an exposure of light-toned bedrock called “Copper Cove,” and the science team was interested to determine if this unit underlies or overlies the rock sequence explored earlier. After performing an abrasion to get a closer look at the chemistry and textures, the rover drove south to scout out more sites along the outer edge of the Jezero crater rim.
Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis. The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA's Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for the agency by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover. WATSON was built by Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) in San Diego and is operated jointly by MSSS and JPL. Other panoramas of Mars by Perseverance rover:
Written by Athanasios Klidaras, Ph.D. candidate at Purdue University, and Megan Kennedy Wu, Senior Mission Operations Specialist at Malin Space Science Systems
A key objective for Perseverance's mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet's geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).
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The planet Earth has proven to be too limiting for our awesome community of panorama photographers. We're getting an increasing number of submissions that depict locations either not on Earth (like Mars, the Moon, and Outer Space in general) or do not realistically represent a geographic location on Earth (either because they have too many special effects or are computer generated) and hence don't strictly qualify for our Panoramic World project.But many of these panoramas are extremely beautiful or popular of both.So, in order to accommodate our esteemed photographers and the huge audience that they attract to 360Cities with their panoramas, we've created a new section (we call it an "area") called "Out of this World" for panoramas like these.Don't let the fact that these panoramas are being placed at the Earth's South Pole fool you - we had to put them somewhere in order not to interfere with our Panoramic World.Welcome aboard on a journey "Out of this World".
