Perseverance rover imaged one of its drill bits on Sol 1494 with a MastCam-Z camera. We can see a rock core inside its sample tube. I’m assuming this is the same core (#29) that was imaged inside the rover with its CacheCam a couple of days ago. I’m not sure why it’s been brought outside again. But one possible answer is that the core is stuck in its tube and preventing it being pushed down into the sample tube far enough, to permit capping / sealing the tube.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
I tried to post one of those new images a short time ago, but could not load images to Lemmy… I’ll try again after this reply
At this time I can’t tell in the relatively low resolution image if it’s the same face we imaged before with the CacheCam last time
If it’s a different face we may have lost some of the core when it was returned to the cache.
Agreed re crawl. Some of that could have been the same DSN issues where commands for MSL were not uplinked due to tech issues at the DSN, some could have been missed for M2020.
NASA has recently suffered a bunch of staffing, with another 25% cut in the 2026 budget, with MSR effectively canceled, not the sort of thing that generates motivation if you ask me. :(
My compliments to JV, that’s excellent work. I’m seeing some new and exciting details in this sample here.
I will never play down or discount budget cuts, but I will say this - under Trump (and Musk), tariff policy is practically fodder for meteorologists; it changes about as often as the major weather systems do. I think we will find that the story of the budget will change with the prevailing wind as well. Planetary science has seen dark days (under Nixon, and after Viking) before, and even Steve Squyres himself had his tussles with the Obama administration. This battle isn’t over yet, Paul.
I don’t think that battle will ever end. Such battles end up scrapping years of work. Budgets that change every 4 years on most missions are really wasteful, budgets that change more frequently are madness IMHO. We’ll see how it plays out this time.