As of about 17:00 UT today (15 January), there are new images on the server, but they were all taken more than a week ago.

I hope all the JPL folk are OK!

Mmmmmmmmm 🍽

Massive dust-free jointed angular boulder faces, served on a bed of saltating basaltic grains, with light-toned speckles and a light purple Jezero-style coating, delicately applied.

Carbon-restricted dining at its finest. 3/5 stars.

Based on yesterday’s images, they’re thinking of drilling again, but we’ve moved 30 m downhill since! I guess Percy was being an impatient horsey again (and to be fair, we hadn’t moved in over a week anyway).

I don’t know about you, Paul, but I find it amusing to think that we have more missions studying the weather and atmosphere than we do the surface, and that was true even when Zhurong and InSight were still going strong. Obviously it’s easier to orbit than to land, but between the USA, Europe and Asia I count six active missions, and I’m not even including the Chinese orbiter, which doesn’t do weather studies per se AFAIK.

I don’t envy the public outreach folks at NASA or ESA, when I find invariably find people IRL doing double takes and stopping me with “Wait, Mars has an atmosphere??” LOL I guess the video of Curiosity and Percy parachuting down to the surface doesn’t cut through, although people will then tell me about how dangerous the wind is going to be for the Mark Watneys of the future 😁

Yep. We used to get satellite weather summaries fairly regularly, but Malin Space Science stopped publishing them a while back for some reason. Still, I find it pretty interesting to look at some of these old reports, if only to spin Mars around and see how pretty the planet would look from high orbit, with all those nearly-bluish cloud systems and muddy-looking dust raising events. The link shows what the planet looked like at this time (early spring) three Martian years ago:

Looking towards the equatorial latitudes, the aphelion cloud belt proceeded to take hold with water ice clouds in abundance from Tharsis to Elysium. Skies remained storm-free for Curiosity in Gale Crater and InSight on Elysium Planitia each afternoon.

Freaky to think that the Martian tropics have a cloudy season like our tropics do, even if the cause is completely different…

Geologist lingo:

• Coring - Drilling in order to acquire a “core sample”, in this case for return to Earth (hopefully). Often proves difficult, on every planet we’ve tried it.
• Conglomerate - Sedimentary rock that contains rounded pebbles surrounded by finer-grained stuff (e.g. mud, sand), like raisins sprinkled in dough. Not surprising to find these where a river flowed, naturally.
• Delta fan - the flattish “platform” of sediment dumped by a river entering a larger, calmer body of water.
• Vug - Small cavity inside a rock, as distinct from a mineral vein (which are long, narrow, and filled in). Can be created by a variety of causes. Sometimes filled in later, by agents such as flowing groundwater.

Well well, this one is certainly different from the last few around the rim interior! This stuff doesn’t seem like a good candidate for coring, given the evident weakness/crumbliness.

When looking at some of the LED-lit night-time imagery of this new one, I was immediately reminded of the sandstone/conglomerate-type rocks we analyzed down on the delta fan (Ouzel Falls and Thunderbolt Peak), but those were evidently more “solid” in bulk, despite their “messy”, pebbly appearance (or so I considered them at the time!)

The friability of this latest one is pretty unprecedented - we’ve definitely seen prior examples of targeted rock breaking under the abrasion bit, but in a much cleaner way (Malgosa Crest, taken on the edge of Neretva Vallis, was the last one to do this, but that one has distinct vugs, and was definitely a harder material; Elkwallow Gap, from the delta front/“bacon strip” region, was surprisingly weak, but broke clean in two - and that only after digging into the rock a fair distance, it seems).

I find it particularly interesting that the points where the rock is most brittle/cracked align very neatly with darkest material in the patch… and there is quite a bit more to see here besides. This mission is just so much fun. Happy terrestrial New Year!

What are we hoping to learn from the abrasion patches?

A great deal.

• What is the overall elemental chemistry of the rock/target? (identifying iron, carbon, sulfur, magnesium, oxygen etc. etc.)
• How are the elements in the rock put together? (in other words, the minerals formed by those elements)
• Are there organic molecules present? (If so, not necessarily signs of biology, but are always worth learning more about)
• The “texture” of the rock (is it made of loosely bound material like pebbles and sand, or large close-packed solid mineral grains, or something else entirely?)
• What is the rock like inside? (Sometimes different from the outside! Percy has found dissolved salts and mineral veins in some rock interiors, which were not even hinted at from analysis of the outer surface)

The above is not a complete list. The dust and weathering rinds Paul Hammond mentions (the undisturbed outer surface of the rock), in general, prevent you from answering these questions in the same detail, or at all. By answering the first two questions above, you get a good idea of how the rock formed and what it contains (e.g. is this volcanic rock - like from a lava flow - or something laid down in calm water, or something else entirely)?

Generally speaking, if the mission decides to abrade a hole in some rock, it’s a sign that the geologists find the stuff interesting, or at least need to identify what’s at that spot to make sense of the immediately surrounding landscape.

I’m still working on a series of posts explaining all this in more detail - with neat pictures - but it’s going to take a while yet (we’ve made more than 30 of these holes, and they’ve shown us quite a few different things from start to finish!) Questions are welcome!

Sampling here wouldn’t surprise me, given the mission’s pace of late, although there’s a lot more outcrop to study just downhill, which makes me wonder if they’re going to be careful and selective. If the long-term plan really is to drive Percy back to the crater floor some time from now, they don’t need to be quite so cautious about preserving tubes as they have been, you’d think…

Close-up, sol 1360, taken in the early afternoon

Close-up, sol 1360, taken in the evening (illuminated by LED)

This stuff doesn’t superficially resemble any of the prior patches closely; this should be fun to dig into!

EDIT: fixed broken link

Why wouldn’t there be avalanches on Mars? It’s a rocky planet, and gravity doesn’t function any differently there. Same goes for Earth’s Moon. Satellites orbiting Mars have managed to catch them in progress, and that I believe was even before the InSight lander proved there are fairly strong groundquakes, which would trigger even more. And this is a planet known for its deep canyons…

a day of on duststorm days?

Ha, I wish it was just a day.

Adding to what Paul Hammond wrote, Perseverance, the rover itself, has not been forced to stop yet for bad visibility. The storms have never gotten that bad here in Jezero since this mission started 2+ Martian years ago, and we haven’t seen a really bad “global” storm since that 2018 one. Unfortunately, even smaller Martian storms can lift the dust so damned high in the atmosphere that it takes weeks or even months to fall out, and the winter season is known to be dusty, so… we’re stuck with this scenery-killing haze for a while.

Paul, let me thank you again for all that you do to keep this community going. I know this question is kind of detailed, but I’d be happy if you could steer me even a little here.

I have some confused impressions about Ingenuity’s last several flights. I seem to remember the flight team (or someone at JPL) mentioning that the drone’s navigation software was having trouble orienting itself above mega-ripples and ripple fields, like the one occupying the Neretva channel, though Ginny had crossed plenty of ripple fields elsewhere in Jezero. If those fields were that disorienting, why was the team determined to fly the drone along that terrain, rather than directly across? (You can see that in flights 68-70, they didn’t take the short way across the ripples, as they did in flights 36-40!) Some stretches of the Neretva channel do have steep sides, admittedly, especially as one moves in the upstream direction. I can imagine that they wanted Ginny to avoid that sloping terrain - well and good; why not follow the edge of the upper fan, then, alongside the channel, as Percy did? I do remember that the terrain was very blocky, and that it was slow going for the rover, but Ginny had navigated such terrain before itself, simply keeping up with the rover. They could have flown Ginny across the same relatively narrow and unrippled reach of Neretva that the rover took on the way to Bright Angel.

For me, the irony of Ingenuity’s loss is that it did not occur in flying over all the variegated terrain of the crater floor - confusing even to geologists - or the steep cliffs of the delta front, or the weird surface of the upper fan… but in a ripple field. On a vertical hop, no less, when no lateral motion was planned. Geoscience me thinks, probably naïvely, that moderately-sized ripple fields like the one in Neretva are among the most organized and benign terrains the landscape offers in this part of Mars. They’re not featureless like the smooth slopes of the crater rim - ripple crests are readily identifiable in Ginny NavCam images as sequential, distinct and curvilinear, forming high-contrast boundaries in most, if not all, cases. So you… land between them, where slopes are gentlest (and the drone didn’t even seem to need the flattest slopes available!) I’m not a coder or engineer by any means, and I’m not trying to say that any of this is easy, but… if ripple fields are disorienting to the point where you must fly over them high and fast, shouldn’t we have avoided them as much as possible?

Worth noting that we’ve traversed about 3.5 km and climbed 400 m since the beginning of the “Crater Rim” campaign, c. sol 1245. This rover really has traveled.

I have only anecdotal evidence to support this, but:

Looking at images like this from the same time last Martian year, when we were on the crater floor, it seemed pretty dusty then, as well.

We’ve known for quite some time, however, that this general time of year (northern hemisphere winter) is dusty, and we’re not very far into spring as yet. I think there would be a lot of science value in observing dust devil and wind gust activity from a significant elevation like this, and I long to see the kind of views you’re talking about as well. Unfortunately, dust devils are more of a summer thing, and the mission seems determined to get Percy up and over the summit ASAP. I personally learned to look at Mars differently after seeing the colour images from Ingenuity’s later flights, and the perspective on this canyon and delta region from the summit could be significant, not to mention inspiring… provided we could actually see what the view really has to offer.

I’ve complained about the nosebleeds enough already, so I’m going to refrain from commenting on Ken Farley’s driving habits.

There’s going to be a lot of this for the next little while. From the photos returned over recent sols, it would seem the only nearby target of interest is… the rover itself, or rather, the rover’s tracks. (There is definitely worthwhile science to be had from observing the tracks, but the study won’t be photogenic in the meanwhile).

To be fair, there isn’t much but sand and fine gravel around the rover at the moment and for a distance ahead, but the “Crater Rim” part of the campaign is going to look a bit strange in retrospect. Only two abrasion holes and no cores until we reach the summit? I’m looking forward to hearing the latest update from the rover team, because they seem to be sure of what they’re doing.

Moderators, would it be possible to add a pinned post or two, with some resources to give people an overview of what Percy has done so far? The mission website outlines things to an extent, but I’d be happy to add some explanatory material. I’m thinking, to give one example, of a post that shows all the abrasion patches Percy has made to date. IRL I get a lot of blank reactions when I try to show people photos of geological materials on a screen, or comments like, “It’s just a rock. So what?” Seeing all of the holes/patches in a montage would be very illuminating, however.

If a pinned post isn’t the best way, I’ll go ahead with making a new post each time we get suitable images from a new patch, but it might be difficult to find in a search. I look forward to your feedback.

Thanks! They’re being thorough with SuperCam and the UV imager again, even if (I suspect) they don’t expect fluorescent minerals up here. I imagine this site will get the “full treatment”, as Mars Guy puts it.

This latest abrasion hole, with the fair-sized mineral grains it exposes, really makes me wonder about the dark massive rocks capping the hill, which Prof. Ruff tentatively identified as ignimbrites. Everyone came into this mission jazzed about sedimentary geology, but the volanic/igneous history of this place is proving to be pretty interesting, even mysterious.

EDITED an erroneous adjective.

Someone like you, who comes into a calm, science-oriented community with F-bombs and complete cluelessness, should be able to understand this:

I didn’t study geology or science for years to answer questions from the likes of you. You want a guide? F*** you, pay me.

No one owes you and your s***ty attitude a damned thing. Don’t presume that your talk about “getting interested in science” is fooling anybody or represents anyone else, nor does it make up for your entitlement. Paul Hammond and other volunteers here are doing an amazing job. You want better, do it yourself.

I don’t think we need users like Linktank around here.

Aside from the entitlement and total lack of self-awareness on display here, there are plenty of science-aware people who avoid social media precisely because of this kind of cretinous toxicity. I am inclined to increase my “engagement” here, and I’ve actually increased my scrutiny of this mission because of respectful and genuine questions I’ve seen online… but when I encounter aggressive BS like this, it doesn’t feel worthwhile.

The mission website and associated media can answer basic, er, “questions” like those above, but I actually do think there’s more of a need to connect the dots for those who want to actually get a feel for the seriously amazing work this mission is doing. To me Lemmy doesn’t seem to be the kind of place where a more detailed guide should be hosted, but I’m open to ideas for how it could be done. I’ve actually been working for a while on a few posts for this instance myself, but it’s a time-consuming process!

Your username works very well here 😁