As the world watched eagerly on Thursday as NASA’s Perseverance rover landed successfully on Mars, snapshots flooded social media of excited viewers posing on the Red Planet.
Most were courtesy of NASAs Mars Perseverance photo booth, a virtual photo where you can upload a photo to yourself (or a particular curmudgeonly senator) pose on Mars, next to NASA’s robotic rover or the Atlas V rocket that launched it into space, or on the ground at mission control. It’s one of many interactive functions the agency created for space aficionados to join the hype, including several themed social media filters, an interactive launch package, and a 3D tour of the Persistence.
Welcome to Mars! We can’t (yet!) Bring you to Mars, but we can bring the Red Planet to you, ”read NASA’s photo booth page.
NASA originally released its suite of persistence-themed online goodies last summer, but the rover’s highly anticipated launch this week sparked another wave of pseud0-Mars selfies on Twitter, Instagram, and the like. (If you snapped one, share it in the comments!)
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NASA’s rover successfully landed on Mars at 3:55 p.m. ET (12:55 p.m. PT) Thursday and landed in the Jezero crater, the site of a former lake and river delta. The 2,260-pound rover will roam the Red Planet for the next two years, looking for evidence that it once had microscopic life. The Perseverance, which is now the fifth rover to reach the surface of Mars, is one of three missions launched this month along with the The UAE’s Hope probe and the Chinese Tianwen-1 mission.