Perfect :)

Agreed fully regarding being a poor candidate for coring.

The night shots were not down when I posted the other images, the colours under the white LEDs are interesting :) I wish they would take more at night with those white LED, not just cored holes and abrasions :)

My brain refused to recall ‘Friability’ when I made the post… LOL

What vistas and rock types await… It’s going to be a fun year ahead :)

Screen capture from JPL’s mission map, the yellow line is the traverse on Sol 1363

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Drive data from JPL’s JSON URLs (updated after each drive)

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Data for the drive on sol 1362. Data extracted from JPLs JSON URLs

Screen capture of the post-drive traverse map

The rover abrades rocks using a tool on its robotic arm before drilling them in order to clear away dust and weathering rinds, allowing other instruments to study the rocks and determine if scientists want to grab a sample of them. In this case after studying this patch the team decided not to take a sample at this stage, and have just driven away from the location. This could be because they have a limited supply of empty sample tubes, and they want to check the region thoroughly before deciding which targets to obtain a rock core for sample return.

Sol 1362 - They just drove away, >80 meters north (guess). So no sample here (yet) :)

Yes, there are avalanches on Mars, they have imaged the aftermath of rock, dust and ice block slides on Mars, they’ve even imaged clouds of dust kicked up just after rock slides. These were images by the MRO (orbiter) HiRISE camera

The rover has just completed a drive to a new location on sol 1362 (December 19, 2024)

We have a few post-drive images, but not the full set it normally acquires. Here is one of the partial images (missing one tile) that shows the wheel tracks to the south and the rover looking West-Southwest. There is a projected path the rover is destined to traverse, but the mission is science led, and they often divert off the notional paths that they have published. The next drive should be West towards a science waypoint they have dubbed ‘Witch Hazel Hill’. Watch this space in the next day or so and you’ll find an updated map showing the rover’s location and its latest post-drive photos

I guess it would make more sense to do a little walkabout before thinking about taking another core. It’s not like there is a rush with MSR on the way to Mars to collect the samples…

Interesting stuff.

Hopefully the team will release early test results on this patch :)

Time for a sample? :)

The path of the sol 1359 drive (yellow)

Drive data for sol 1359, new record downslope change in elevation :)

Wheel tracks suggest that the driving conditions outside the crater are pretty good (no wheel slip)

They take specific sets of images from time to time to search for dust devils and dust lifting events. These are acquired a few seconds apart so they can form animations if any activity is seen. Automatic processes can easily be set up to review the images and alert operators of any positive hits.

Those sequences are planned more frequently in the seasons and at the time of day when winds are expected to be high enough to create dust devil etc. They don’t catch dust devils in every sequence, but when they so the science team can estimate the speed, how high they go etc. This gives them a lot of data on the climate on mars.

They have even recoded the sound of a vortex (probably a dust devil) passing over Perseverance rover. Here’s a video that has the sound https://youtu.be/lICyLnT7iPo

Always drive carefully, especially when visibility is reduced :)

They are mostly seasonal.

Those shown here are from several different missions.

They are rarely easy to see in the images, as they are so feint that you need to over-process the images to make them show, that’s why the images are usually grainy

It travelled a distance of 45.16 kilometers (28.06 miles)

If they encountered a really bad storm that reduced visibility to a point where it could be hazardous to drive, they would restrict movement until the storm abated, because they use a series of images acquired throughout the drives to reduce hazards.

Opportunity rover was unfortunate to be affected by such a storm back in 2018, one of its last images (thumbnail) was pointed at the sun, but the sun was barely visible. The solar powered rover did not survive that storm. Such storms would not affect the rovers currently exploring Mars as they are nuclear powered, but operations would definitely be affected.

On the other hand, the solar powered Mars helicopter did have storm days in Jezero. where it was stood down due to increased levels of dust.