Perseverance plate - family portrait by docwolvie

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

NASA's rover Perseverance carries a nice plate on its body.
It represents all the American rovers which landed on Mars: Sojourner (1997), Spirit/Opportunity (2004), Curiosity (2012) and of course Perseverance+Ingenuity (2021).
This is my humble attempt at recreating this beautiful piece of art that NASA's scientists put on the rover.
It is based on some of the first images sent back from Perseverance, mainly the one captured on Feb. 24, 2021 (Sol 3) at the local mean solar time of 16:22:38.https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/ZRF_0003_0667220953_000FDR_N0010052AUT_04096_034085J01
Edit for v3: a recently released image of the plate being prepared for the assembly was crucial to estimate the size.
NASA also release a very good image of the design of the plate, which I used to create a vectorial version. Then I improved it a bit, both to make it printable and to make it closer to the real plate. IMHO the plate on Perseverance is very slightly different from the officialy released design (eg. the helicopter has one rotor only).
I am including:
full plate (base+incision)
base
incision
incision + guides (very thin walls, not printed, which helps aligning the incision to the base)
washer (print x6 if you want)
svg of the drawing
My recommendations:
print the base with standard 0.4 mm walls, 1.6 mm tick or whatever you like
print the incision with 0.35 mm walls, tickness depends on how good your white filament covers the black (I needed 4 x 0.2 mm layers to achieve a perfect result). Use the version with the guides to center it on the build plate, with perfect position with respect to the black base.
the washers print fine with 0.4 mm walls
25/02/21 - v1 first release
26/02/21 - v2
.................thinner helicopter blades
.................smaller sojourner wheels
.................slimmer spirit/oppy turret
.................smoother perseverance arm joint
02/03/21 - v3 and DEFINITIVE - mainly derived from NASA's image
.................Ingenuity more simmetrical
.................every wheel has been drawn from scratch
.................better turrets for every rover
.................better arm for Perseverance
.................added a base for the plate
.................added washers