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By NASA
Explore This Section Perseverance Home Mission Overview Rover Components Mars Rock Samples Where is Perseverance? Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Mission Updates Science Overview Objectives Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Perseverance Raw Images Images Videos Audio More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions Mars Home 3 min read
A Dust Devil Photobombs Perseverance!
Perseverance self portrait, acquired by the WATSON camera on Sol 1500 on Mars. The Bell Island borehole where the rover acquired a sample is visible in the workspace in front of the rover. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Written by Athanasios Klidaras, Ph.D. candidate at Purdue University, and Megan Kennedy Wu, Senior Mission Operations Specialist at Malin Space Science Systems
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.
Learn more, and see more detailed views of Perseverance’s ‘Selfie With Dust Devil’
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Last Updated May 29, 2025 Related Terms
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NASA/Jacob Shaw Capturing the high-stakes work behind NASA’s Airborne Science Program takes more than just technical skill – it takes vision. At NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, videographer Jacob Shaw brings that vision to life, documenting missions with a style and storytelling approach all his own.
“Armstrong is full of cutting-edge flight research and remarkable people,” Shaw said. “Being able to shape how those stories are told, in my own style, is incredibly rewarding.”
Armstrong is full of cutting-edge flight research and remarkable people. Being able to shape how those stories are told, in my own style, is incredibly rewarding.
jacob Shaw
NASA Videographer
Shaw recently earned first place in NASA’s 2024 Videographer of the Year Awards, documentation category, for his film, “Reflections,” which chronicles the 2024 Airborne Science mission PACE-PAX – short for Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem Postlaunch Airborne eXperiment. The campaign used NASA Armstrong’s ER-2 high-altitude aircraft to collect atmospheric and ocean data in support of the PACE satellite, launched in February 2024.
“These missions are live, high-stakes operations – even if the crew makes it look effortless,” Shaw said. “I’m fascinated not just with capturing these moments, but with shaping them into meaningful stories through editing.”
NASA videographer Jacob Shaw shares a moment with his constant companion during a lunch break in the cafeteria at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, on May 21, 2025. Shaw recently earned first place in NASA’s 2024 Videographer of the Year Awards – documentation category – for his film, “Reflections,” which chronicles the 2024 Airborne Science mission PACE-PAX – short for Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem Postlaunch Airborne eXperiment.NASA/Genaro Vavuris Shaw’s passion for video began early, inspired by watching his father film family memories with a VHS camcorder in the early 1990s. He said seeing those moments captured made him realize the power of documenting reality and inspired him to pursue videography as a professional and personal passion.
“What I love most about creating videos for NASA at Armstrong Flight Research Center is the creative freedom I’m given to craft stories,” Shaw said. “I’m trusted to take a concept and run with it.”
Since joining the video team in 2021, Shaw has documented dozens of missions, helping to share the center’s groundbreaking work with the world.
“We’re a small crew that wears many hats, always stepping up to get the job done,” Shaw said. “I am thankful for their encouragement to submit my work [for this award], and proud to bring home the gold for Armstrong!”
NASA videographer Jacob Shaw captures footage of the ER-2 aircraft inside a hangar at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, in December 2024. Shaw recently earned first place in NASA’s 2024 Videographer of the Year Awards – documentation category – for his film, “Reflections,” which chronicles the 2024 Airborne Science mission PACE-PAX – short for Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem Postlaunch Airborne eXperiment.NASA/Genaro Vavuris NASA videographer Jacob Shaw and the video team from NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, prepare to film the launch of NASA’s SPHEREx mission at Vandenberg Space Force Base. The mission, short for Specto-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer, launched on March 11, 2025, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, continuing NASA’s exploration of the cosmos – and its commitment to visual storytelling.NASA/Jim Ross Share
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Last Updated May 23, 2025 EditorDede DiniusContactDede Diniusdarin.l.dinius@nasa.govLocationArmstrong Flight Research Center Related Terms
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NASA’s Perseverance took this selfie on May 10, 2025. The small dark hole in the rock in front of the rover is the borehole made when Perseverance collected its latest sample. The small puff of dust left of center and below the horizon line is a dust devil.NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS The rover took the image — its fifth since landing in February 2021 — between stops investigating the Martian surface.
A Martian dust devil photobombed NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover as it took a selfie on May 10 to mark its 1,500th sol (Martian day) exploring the Red Planet. At the time, the six-wheeled rover was parked in an area nicknamed “Witch Hazel Hill,” an area on Jezero Crater’s rim that the rover has been exploring over the past five months.
“The rover self-portrait at the Witch Hazel Hill area gives us a great view of the terrain and the rover hardware,” said Justin Maki, Perseverance imaging lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission. “The well-illuminated scene and relatively clear atmosphere allowed us to capture a dust devil located 3 miles to the north in Neretva Vallis.”
The selfie also gives the engineering teams a chance to view and assess the state of the rover, its instruments, and the overall dust accumulation as Perseverance reached the 1,500-sol milestone. (A day on Mars is 24.6 hours, so 1,500 sols equals 1,541 Earth days.)
Fifty-nine individual images went into the creation of this Perseverance rover selfie. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS The bright light illuminating the scene is courtesy of the high angle of the Sun at the time the images composing the selfie were taken, lighting up Perseverance’s deck and casting its shadow below and behind the chassis. Immediately in front of the rover is the “Bell Island” borehole, the latest sampling location in the Witch Hazel Hill area.
How Perseverance Did It
This newest selfie, Perseverance’s fifth since the mission began, was stitched together on Earth from a series of 59 images collected by the WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) camera at the end of the robotic arm. It shows the rover’s remote sensing mast looking into the camera. To generate the version of the selfie with the mast looking at the borehole, WATSON took three additional images, concentrating on the reoriented mast.
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A dust devil also whirled by in the distance as one of the hazard-avoidance cameras on NASA’s Perseverance captured the Mars rover coring a sample near the rim of Jezero Crater on April 29, 2025, the 1,490th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.NASA/JPL-Caltech “To get that selfie look, each WATSON image has to have its own unique field of view,” said Megan Wu, a Perseverance imaging scientist from Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego. “That means we had to make 62 precision movements of the robotic arm. The whole process takes about an hour, but it’s worth it. Having the dust devil in the background makes it a classic. This is a great shot.”
Mars Report: Perseverance Catches Dancing Devils The dust covering the rover is visual evidence of the rover’s journey on Mars: By the time the image was captured, Perseverance had abraded and analyzed a total of 37 rocks and boulders with its science instruments, collected 26 rock cores (25 sealed and 1 left unsealed), and traveled more than 22 miles (36 kilometers).
“After 1,500 sols, we may be a bit dusty, but our beauty is more than skin deep,” said Art Thompson, Perseverance project manager at JPL. “Our multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator is giving us all the power we need. All our systems and subsystems are in the green and clicking along, and our amazing instruments continue to provide data that will feed scientific discoveries for years to come.”
The rover is currently exploring along the western rim of Jezero Crater, at a location the science team calls “Krokodillen.”
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DC Agle
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