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!

I’m not the best with emojis, so I might be misunderstanding you, but if “pointing finger” means you want to poke this sample - please don’t. The skeptics will say you contaminated them, and then we’ll never hear the end of this “life on Mars” business…

Here’s an example from the Perseverance rover community - it includes details like the length of the drive (in metres and in minutes), the rover’s geographic position, orientation and elevation at the end of the drive, and so on.

We don’t have any information on what the expectations or plans are for the drives when we get this data - that is only reported months later, when planning data is publicly released. Paul Hammond and I are slowly working on making this sort of information more accessible (I’m trying to add annotated maps and context, for example), so if you have any ideas on what you’d like to see from these updates, feel free to share.

NASA will host a media teleconference at 11 a.m. EDT Wednesday, Sept. 10, to discuss the analysis of a rock sampled by the agency’s Perseverance Mars rover last year, which is the subject of a forthcoming science paper.

The sample, called “Sapphire Canyon,” was collected in July 2024 from a set of rocky outcrops on the edges of Neretva Vallis, a river valley carved by water rushing into Jezero Crater long ago.

There was a lot of excitement last year when Percy examined the unusual bedrock on the floor of the Neretva river channel. That material - mostly or entirely soft mud and silt laid down by the former river - had some interesting markings that the science team nicknamed “poppy seeds” (small dark markings in abrasion #25, on the south side of the channel - see here for a close-up) and, on the north side of the channel, “leopard spots” (the small dark spots with light-toned rims, between the coarse white mineral veins, in this image, from the site of abrasions #26 and #27).

It wasn’t long before the Principal Investigator himself, Ken Farley, was identifying this material (which we have obtained as sample #25) as “very important” - even using words like “potential biosignature” in a presentation at CalTech last year (I’ve linked to the relevant portion of the talk, but the entire 33 min video is worth watching). Since August 2024, there have been some small publications about this material, but it appears that we finally have more results and analysis on the docket. I could speculate on what the science team will be presenting, but I’d rather not steal their thunder, so I’ll just leave a link to my (still very rudimentary) guide for the portion of the mission, in and around the river channel, last year.

Several of the brass from NASA HQ, including Trump’s “temporary NASA administrator”, but also several actual senior NASA scientists, will be attending, so don’t miss this one if you’re interested!

It might be amusing to track a mountain goat - you know, like they have on Earth - via GPS, and see if it produces a wandering path anything like the above traverse map. (I intend no insult to goats or rover AIs with this comparison)

Judging from the last two weeks of short drives up the current slope (zoom in on the map above to see what I mean), it would appear that the science team is very carefully documenting the different outcrops/rock types we can see around here.

I’ve only noticed this level of interest concentrated in one small area twice before this year, in two spots further north (Witch Hazel hill), where the rover acquired quite a few samples. Based on the topography, I’m speculating that this layer/set of strata wasn’t exposed further north. No geologist likes a gap in their wedding cake, of course - and that’s even before you consider that the rim of this crater is not recording a gently-deposited set of flat layers, but a wild sequence of different rocks, altered in different ways, and quite possibly at different times. So what we’ve found on the rim already demands we be complete with our investigation; OTOH, it may be that they’ve spotted something interesting in the mineralogy here that warrants this kind of careful mapping.

There is a basic question to be asked here: how much of the these flattish rocks we find on the slope are basically volcanic in origin (as Mars Guy would only be too happy to tell you about), and how much is due to the mind-bending, one-and-done violence of the original Jezero impact, which punched out a basin 50 km across and half a kilometre deep (at the very least)? Though Curiosity has been climbing its mountain for many years, Percy has experienced an elevation change almost as great in its much shorter mission, simply by driving out of the crater and onto the Nili plateau - and Jezero is a fairly modest-sized crater by Martian standards.

When you consider that this landscape might preserve evidence of a much larger impact found far downriver from Jezero (the one that made the Isidis basin, a mere 1500 km across), not to mention the immense age of the Nili countryside, which still shows traces of eruptions originating far underground, the question of “impact vs. volcanism” no longer seems like a small question, but a global one.

I feel small now.

They’ve used artificial lighting on most of the abrasion patches, which is pretty useful for seeing patterns and comparing features across a lot of different rock types:

For comparison, the abrasion patches under natural lighting:

we can just see the features of the target in an otherwise dark time exposure image. I can’t recall seeing that before

There are a number of striking examples of lighter-toned features showing up neatly in the images you refer to (patch #43, the notoriously difficult patch #32), and there are more subtle examples as well (patch #28, which we made before leaving the river channel in 2024). I do plan to add a page to the guide I’m roughing out which will document these night-time UV-exposure images, but my plate is full enough for now 😁

Best I can do at the moment:

Pardon me while I piggyback onto this post:

Impressive. The scale for this image would be about 1 m or so, correct?

Often I’ve wondered: what would the life of a Martian farmer be like? Build a dome over some modest-sized crater - well-shielded from the radiation, of course - and try to make a go of it using Earth seed stock.

There’s a severe lack of organic matter, nitrogen and so on, but the image of green things growing under a dome in a landscape like this really stays in my head. Would vegetation follow Martian or Earthly seasons? The NASA Planetary Protection people would probably kill me, of course, and even I agree: Mars is not our plaything, we should respect it. It still sounds so appealing, though…

How so?

This is my first attempt at a Paul Hammond impression, so please be gentle with your criticisms/requests for improvements!

For context, here is a (very) zoomed-out view of the same outcrop, with part of the rover in the foreground:

Earth analogue studies!! Feel free to share any images of what you have in mind! 😊

(I don’t expect mrfriki or anyone else here to provide us with an Earth site equivalent to the rim of a ~50 km impact crater, LOL. I’m simply interested in what people have to share that might be even mildly pertinent)

This really is a striking and beautiful image. Those mid-afternoon clouds should continue to be a feature for a while, at least 'til mid-summer proper, a few weeks from now. I wonder if they persist until sunset. I’m all for a geology focus on this mission, but I admit it would be nice to take movies of the horizon in this tropical cloudy season. We’d catch a lot of dust devils, too, like the one in the upper left!

I’m also not sure I remember seeing such a sharp transition from bright to dark tracks like trailing off into the distance like this before. A lot to contemplate here…

There are several grave environmental and civil problems with Starlink and other proposed massive constellations:

• The threat to the ozone layer (when these low-orbiting sats start re-entering en masse in the next few years, we’re going to have more aluminum in the upper atmosphere than ever before - a known problem)
• Overcrowding of LEO - the choicest orbital space over this planet is finite. Satellites in low orbit have tremendous kinetic energy and do not (cannot) fly in formation, as they spread out vertically; not that Starlink is designed to. Kessler Syndrome catastrophe or not, the risk of collisions is increasing rapidly. As some researchers have put it, LEO is the “Wild West” right now, and it definitely needs to be regulated by international treaty.
• Light and radio pollution - aside from exacerbating the accelerating ecological damage from light pollution, this extends even to orbiting assets like the Hubble Telescope, which is already seeing interference from Starlink sats. I don’t see why SpaceX or any corporation, let alone nation, deserves to monopolize any part of the global environment this way. Astronomy and upper atmosphere research don’t need to justify their existence, particularly not in this situation… and yes, stargazers on this planet deserve the right to a “clean” night sky.
• Corporate squatting - Starlink is approaching the point of outnumbering all other extant satellites from all other nations, since the start of the space age, combined. Why do they get to crowd everyone else out?
• Vulnerability to the space environment - when the Sun acts up, Starlink sats have been disabled before, and in numbers. This is a threat to satellites in general (obviously), many of which are not shielded properly, but launching bunches of these satellites at once increases the threat sharply. I’m sure you’d agree that orbital debris is not something we should take lightly.

I could go on, but I trust you get the point. I don’t object to temporary small-scale deployments of satellite groups during catastrophes, but we simply don’t need the permanent deployment of tens of thousands of satellites that the US, Europe and China intend to launch for global internet coverage - that can be almost entirely achieved from the ground.

Oh yes, I would have turned around and back-tracked to touch these “etched” skeletal rocks too!

Is Curiosity picking up the bad habit of running back and forth excitedly from Perseverance? I hope so!

(Yes, I know, we’ve found other spherule-encrusted rocks before. We’ve even tried to sample them. That being said, there have been more and more weird rocks as we’ve climbed out of Jezero and into the great big world beyond it…)