Worth noting that the rover has now been investigating this little stretch of hillside for 28 unbroken sols (Percy hasn’t left a tight zone about 20x20 m across for 23 sols now).

Only one other part of the rim has seen this kind of dedicated interest (the area where we took samples #26 and #27, just below the rim summit/ridgeline); Percy made two abrasions there, but only after the area was first briefly scouted, passed, then returned to. In the current area, the rover has made three abrasions just a few metres apart - the only place where it has done so all mission long. A casual review of the rover’s traverse over the last 18 months shows just one other area where Percy continuously lingered so long - the northern side of the Neretva Vallis channel, where the “potential biosignature” was found.

I am definitely not saying that the science team has identified anything similar here. As far as I can tell, the interest we’re seeing in the current site is partly due to a geologic quirk - the way this crater rim exposes multiple different rock types across short stretches. It could be that the science team is simply running investigations differently now that we only have 8 completely unused sample tubes remaining. That being said, this area clearly has multiple targets worthy of investigation, and the string of short drives we’ve made in the last three weeks indicate that this area is being closely and systematically surveyed. The ridgeline site we investigated earlier this year returned two very different samples: one badly fractured and impact-damaged, the other “softer”, finer-grained, and unmistakably altered by water - heavily so.

So what have we found here so far? The mission hasn’t said much yet, but the dual-sample site I refer to above was studied in just this way, only more briefly - and we can definitely see that water has altered the rock here too, in a way we haven’t see on the rim before (those mineral veins didn’t fill themselves). Stay tuned!