NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover

4-tile - post-drive NavCam - NASA/JPL-Caltech

4-tile post drive NavCam. We can see the tracks heading off to the East NASA/JPL-Caltech

6 post-drive NavCam tiles assembled in MS-ICE NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Assembled / cropped in MS-ICE - NASA/JPL-Caltech

Mission update dated May 19, 2025.

For those following the mission closely - Note the demotion of the senior science staff. This does not bode well

End-of-Drive 4-tile L-NavCam NASA/JPL-Caltech

For more details on this latest sample (which has not yet been sealed away), the mission has posted an informative blog as well, but Mars Guy brings the neat animations and the narrative, as always.

Processed MastCam-Z image (full zoom) of a small Ventifact.

A ventifact is a rock that has been abraded, pitted, etched, grooved, or polished by wind-driven sand or ice crystals. The word "Ventifact" is derived from the Latin word "Ventus" meaning ‘wind'. These geomorphic features are most typically found in arid environments where there is little vegetation to interfere with aeolian particle transport, where there are frequently strong winds, and where there is a steady but not overwhelming supply of sand. Wikipedia :)

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover made history by detecting them for the first time from the surface of another planet, and MAVEN confirmed the detection.

Some quick analysis:

• Well, let's see... this one isn't fractured like half the patches we've made on this outer rim of Jezero (e.g. #39, #36), has a neat circular outline, and seems to have reached a decent depth. Seems like a clean abrasion to me. So that means it would be difficult to sample, right? 😆

• The target rock seems to have been chosen in part because it forms small resistant "nubs" (that is, it forms little ridges; the stuff hasn't been eroded down to near-perfect smoothness, like some other outcrops that gave the sampling system a lot of trouble). The chisel marks on this patch - the lines radiating from the center - aren't very distinct like past ones (e.g. #30, which features some harder volcanic minerals), so it is probably average in terms of hardness.

• Just look at all those dark spots, dramatically sprinkled through the dark tan body of this rock! Patch #39 had dark grains too, but they were much smaller, much more rounded; the science team thinks those are spherules embedded in the rock up there. Not so down here. If you zoom in, you can see that the dark material seems to be made of clumps of different, smaller grains, rather than just being one kind of mineral. It looks like we've got a grab bag of different things going on here, which is always exciting! In fact, this one doesn't really resemble any of the prior 39 patches. And that only makes this one more interesting, because...

• Percy is near the bottom of the outer rim, just above the local floor of the Nili Plateau, which features some of the oldest known rocks on Mars - and could be dramatically different from what Percy or any other rover has explored so far. Yes, we know Mars was wet, we know there was a much different climate billions of years ago - but when did that begin? We just might be in the right place to begin finding out...

Closing in on the Transverse Aeolian Ridges (TARs)

The TARs are on the left side of this map.

A visit to the TARs was mentioned in an earlier plan

6 tiles L-NavCam NASA/JPL-Caltech

Map

Drive details

sol 1500 Selfie assembled from 6 overlapping Watson images

Hard to tell if this is the same core imaged a few sols ago. Watch this space for updates. But this one looks ready to cap / seal

NASA/JPL-Caltech