NASA’s Perseverance rover recently captured images of itself alongside a distant Martian dust devil, in a selfie taken by the robotic explorer at Witch Hazel Hill on the rim of the Jezero Crater.
The image, captured on May 10, 2025, celebrated 1,500 Martian days since the lander first touched down in February 2021. Over the last five months, Perseverance has been exploring the Witch Hazel Hill locality in pursuit of fresh stone samples.
“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.”
Beyond serving as a commemorative snapshot, the selfie provides critical information for engineers back on Earth. It allows them to visually assess the rover’s condition, including dust accumulation and the status of exterior instruments.
With Martian days running slightly longer than Earth’s at around 24.6 hours, Perseverance has now spent 1,541 Earth days on the Red Planet.
Anatomy of a Martian Robotic Selfie
Creating the selfie wasn’t as simple as snapping a photo with a smartphone. It required 59 separate images stitched together after being transmitted back to Earth. At the time the images were taken, the Sun was high in the Martian sky, offering a clear view of the rover’s deck, with shadows cast only behind and beneath its body. The Bell Island borehole is also visible in the final image, surrounded by a small gray patch directly in front of the rover, its latest sampling site during the Witch Hazel Hill exploration.
The Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering (WATSON) camera, mounted at the end of a robotic arm, captured the images. One version of the selfie shows the rover’s remote-sensing mast looking straight into the camera, while another—made possible by careful arm positioning and three additional shots—shows the mast gazing toward the Bell Island borehole. This marks the fifth time Perseverance has taken a selfie on Mars.
The Enduring Enigma of Martian Dust Devils
This also isn’t the first Martian dust devil to catch the Perseverance team’s attention. On April 29, 2025, the rover’s hazard-avoidance cameras captured another swirling dust column while Perseverance was in the midst of coring a sample near the crater’s rim.
“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,” Wu said. “This is a great shot.”
Similar images of Martian dust devils were captured earlier this year, where one of the swirling formations was observed as it “cannibalized” a smaller one. In October 2023, Perseverance obtained imagery of a large dust devil traversing the Martian landscape in the distance.
The accumulation of dust on the rover’s deck comes as no surprise. Since its landing, Perseverance has abraded and analyzed 37 rocks and boulders, cored 26 samples, and traveled 22 miles across the Martian landscape.
“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.”
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.