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Washington (dpa) - Taking a selfie in special places is obviously not just for people: On Mars, the NASA rover “Perseverance” took a photo of itself with the mini-helicopter “Ingenuity”.
The US space agency published the photo and wrote that "Perseverance" had taken it with his robotic arm, but that it was actually composed of 62 individual photos.
Next to the rover in the foreground of the picture is the small "Ingenuity" helicopter, which is about four meters away from the vehicle and is scheduled to make its first flight on the Red Planet in the coming days.
The 1.8 kilogram “Ingenuity” (in German: ingenuity) is to rise to a height of about three meters in its first test flight, hover there for thirty seconds and then land again on the surface of Mars.
It would be the first flight of an aircraft on another planet.
The “Ingenuity” powered by lithium-ion batteries could make several more flight attempts for around a month.
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The helicopter has to defy extreme conditions: On Mars it is cold down to minus 90 degrees Celsius at night, the gravitational pull of the planet is also lower and the atmosphere is much thinner.
The mini-helicopter was placed in the belly of “Perseverance” at the end of February - after 203 days of flight and 472 million kilometers traveled - with a risky maneuver in a dry Mars lake called “Jezero Crater”.
Perseverance is to investigate this lake with a diameter of around 45 kilometers over the next two years.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210408-99-129390 / 4
NASA photo