Imaged by the CacheCam on sol 1490 (April 29, 2025)

A fine grained rock core (number 29) was acquired several days ago, but the drill bit was left in the hole. I assume something like a rover fault (during coring) triggered a stop drilling command, this led to the rover calling home and awaiting instructions on how to proceed. Hopefully we’ll get the real reason in a mission update.

Higher resolution CacheCam images will normally be downlinked before they cap the core in its sample tube

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech