NASA Mars Rover Pictures: Google Celebrates 125,428 Photos From Perseverance With Cool Video

Google celebrated Perseverance's six months on Mars. Since it has landed, Perseverance has captured over 125,000 images and videos of the Red Planet for researchers to study. The largest search engine in the world posted a video to simulate what the Mars rovers' Google Photos would look like if it had one.

NASA's Perseverance Rover Has Spent 6 Months on Mars

It has been six Earth months or 177 sols on Mars since the Perseverance Rover landed on the Red Planet with the Ingenuity helicopter hitching a ride, Digital Trends reported. It landed on the Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021.

Since its landing, Perseverance has driven 1.24 miles or 1.99 kilometers across the crater, carrying out its mission.

Its mission is to seek signs of ancient life, collecting rock and regolith samples to take back to Earth one day, NASA explained. It is also helping scientists see the viability of supporting life on Mars, for when astronauts one day make it to the Red Planet. Perseverance has also documented the little Ingenuity helicopter's first days on its mission, like a proud older sibling.

During the past six months, Perseverance has captured 125,438 photos using its many cameras. It has also provided an astonishing 360-degree panoramic view of "Van Zyl Overlook."

Perseverance sends the images back to Earth for scientists, researchers, and space fans to see. In fact, all of NASA's published images are free for anyone to download.

Google Shows Off Google Photos Features With Perseverance's Images

Google took NASA and the rest of us down memory lane with Perseverance's photographs and videos. The search engine giant released a video celebrating the rover's half-year stay with a montage of images of rocks, landscapes, selfies, and the Ingenuity helicopter, CNet said.

To set the mood of the whole video montage, "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" by Jerry Herman plays in the background. Those who have watched "WALL-E" would know that this is the very same song the loveable little garbage robot would hum along to.

The video incorporated features found in Google Photos like its organization system that tags different images and keeps them in specific categories, Digital Trends said. This makes it easy to locate certain photos or videos, especially when you remember the subject of the image but don't remember when it was taken.

Perseverane's Google Photos categories include "shadow selfies," landscapes," "rocks," and "additional rocks." Google also included a short clip of the incredibly crisp video captured during the rover's descent to the Martian crater last year.

Another Google Photos feature Google showed off was its search function, which allows users to search for any image linked to certain keywords. As a cheeky little move, the first search term entered in the video was "Martians" which obviously came up empty. "Water" also returned with no results but "dunes" did pull up quite a lot of images of the Red Planet's sandy land formations.

Perseverance continues to take photographs and collect rock and regolith samples for scientists and researchers back here on Earth. If the studies and missions go right, Perseverance just might meet humans without having to fly back to Earth. NASA is already working on building its team of astronauts for its Mars mission. Those interested in joining the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog can do so until September 17, 2021.