It’s been 6 months since NASA’s selfie-capable Perseverance rover hit the iron oxide floor of Mars. “Percy,” as some affectionately call the bot, has been exceptionally useful in that short span despite only trekking just under one-and-a-quarter miles of surface. It’s also taken more than 125,000 captivating pictures during its stay. Some of them made the creative folks at Google wonder “what if Perseverance had a Google Photos account?”
So it goes as that concept — or, “thought experiment” as Google puts it — has been turned into a neat video set to the tune of “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” from the original film soundtrack of the Broadway musical “Hello, Dolly!”
In it, we scroll through pictures and clips taken by Perseverance hanging out in Google Photos collections including “Shadow Selfies” and “Additional Rocks,” machine-learning-powered searches for subjects like “water” (no results) and “Martians” (also no results), and identifiable friends including the Ingenuity helicopter, sister rover Curiosity, and even Pig Rock (a rock that looks like a pig). No sign of Wall-E on the Red Planet, by the way.
Of course, this whimsical little number is meant to exploit some of your extraterrestrial fascination and turn it into some desire to use Google Photos — and after the decision to end free backups back in June, it desperately needs to mine some of that desire. And hey, it’s not the only Martian-themed Easter egg Google has dreamed up!
By the way, you can check out all of Perseverance’s 125,000 (and growing) images through NASA’s Mars 2020 mission site gallery right here.
Google Photos gives the Mars rover a trip down Memories lane
Source: Poinoy Wattpad
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