I think rule 1.3 may need amended as they are looking for fossils...that's the whole point of the mission...

Ejecta seems to be a more likely explanation. They are interesting though.

Some???

Well This is going to be tricky

OBJECTIVE B: ASTROBIOLOGY
Determine whether an area of interest was suitable for life, and look for signs of ancient life itself.

Perform the following astrobiologically-relevant investigations on the geologic materials at Jezero Crater:

Determine the habitability of an ancient environment.
For ancient environments interpreted to have been habitable, search for materials with high biosignature preservation potential.
Search for potential evidence of past life using the observations regarding habitability and preservation as a guide.
Once Perseverance has a chance to study the landing site and its history, the team should be able to identify whether any locations in the crater were habitable (were liquid water and the chemical building blocks of life present there in the past).

With exoplanets, there hasn't been any trouble with discussing the "habitable zone" without the discussion going off the deep end. The key is that it is plainly just a term relating to a range of a single parameter, temperature – a range that certainly exists – without any speculation of a sci fi nature.

Perseverance is looking for "habitable" times/places in Mars's past. I don't think that forces anyone into wild speculation. We're looking for places that were warm and wet, with the possibility of carbon chemistry. If this proceeds nominally, I don't think Perseverance will require rules changes (or board chaos) any more than Curiosity did.

Thosewere Curiosity mission objectives, Perseverance will do that and much more......

Everybody, 1.3 will not be amended or modified at this time nor at any time in the foreseeable future, and this is the consensus opinion of the admin/mod team after discussions.

As to why, consider what happened this morning. There were two throwaway comments by two members re astrobiology. A third member posted a link with excerpts from a full-up astrobio paper.

That escalated quickly. All OT, all in violation of 1.3. Like life itself, it would quickly evolve and envelop the Forum.

We ain't havin' it. As has been said many times, there are other places to have such discussions.

Moving on.

MSL conveniently landed on a Monday. Most of this, as far as I can tell, is due to a "5-day-a-week during business hours" mentality on the part of somebody and not being able to have a press conference over the weekend.

I don't know of anyone on the team that agrees with this policy, but it is above our pay grade.

Thomas Zurbuchen tweet
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Lots of hazcam images at the raw image site https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/

Fresh pasture at last!
Interesting to see material already in the wheels, blown in from the landing thrusters.

"Mission controllers (...) have received the first status report from the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter": https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8867/nasas-mars-...ter-reports-in/
"... both the helicopter, which will remain attached to the rover for 30 to 60 days, and its base station (...) are operating as expected..."

The rear left hazcam shows one pronounced but small dune nearby. It also shows what appears to be a single streamer of a cloud in the sky.

Yeah, I thought I saw some in an earlier image. I wonder if there's any material on the top deck?

I'm really impressed by the new wheel design:

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"Made of titanium tubing formed with the same process used to make high-end mountain bike frames."

The MMRTG power source has an operational life of 14 years. So if they take care of it, this rover could last for years and years.

And we're continuing to see pngs, even with the Bayered images! So we can now trivially deBayer, without having to deal with jpeg artifacts, at least with the hazcams:
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Re. the front Hazcams: is "A" the outboard of each L/R pair and "B" inboard?

Quick panorama from the rear Hazcam.
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A is the pair connected to the A flight computer, and B is the pair connected to the B flight computer

Image from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00765-9

I genuinely have no insider info for M2020 ECAM stuff - I'm guessing like everyone else - but it would appear....

Mars_Perseverance_RLB_0002_0667129492_604ECM_N0010052AUT_04096_00_2I3J01
Mars_Perseverance_RLG_0002_0667129481_373ECM_N0010052AUT_04096_00_2I3J01
Mars_Perseverance_RLR_0002_0667129466_057ECM_N0010052AUT_04096_00_2I3J01

Stack to an RGB image...... RLB being the Blue, RLG being the Green etc etc

Images like Mars_Perseverance_FRE_0000_0666958359_772ECM_N0010052AUT_04096_00_0LLJ01 - the E is raw and needs to be debayered ( I used Fitswork )

Click to view attachmentDoug thats works indeed.
Here is the corresponding rear right hazcam image. I think we see the delta remnants as a long mesa, between the plain in the foreground and the crater rim high hills in the background.

Hopefully of use to folks here! A query that returns JSON for the raws.
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The full URL is https://mars.nasa.gov/rss/api/?feed=raw_ima...;&extended=

Thank you Doug for your remarks about colors!

Here is color panorama from rear Hazcam (Sol 2).

Click to view attachmentand here is the D2 front left hazcam in color

Not really. Academia is driven by "publish or perish" and the people doing the science need to have first dibs on the data. We can wait; the Universe will be around for a while.

--Bill

And no Morse code holes for them to escape. Should be nicely polished in there are a few years time

Could the vesicular-looking loose rocks on the surface be eolian weathering of regolith from a vuggy bedrock, with the vugs filled with a softer mineral and subsequently weathered out?

Maybe chicken-wire gypsum or some other evaporite sulfate?

The fresher looking bedrock looks like it is structureless and mottled at the hazcam resolution.

The immediate vicinity of the landing site is not the terrain that motivated Jezero as the destination but it's still interesting to contemplate: Are we seeing material that was emplaced in an aqueous environment, or are we seeing material that was emplaced over a once-aqueous environment?

I suspect the latter. In Gusev Crater, Spirit (through no fault of engineering or its drivers) failed to make direct contact with the lacustrine environment for which it was chosen, and a considerable depth of regolith was emplaced after Ma'adim Vallis flowed into it. The age of Gusev's river and Jezero's should be relatively comparable to the long subsequent era of impact and wind emplacement of material that followed. Those boulders we see, also, seem to indicate impact emplacement.

If there's anything lake-based in the immediate vicinity of Perseverance now, then it had to have come downwards, either as erosion mixed a once-higher lakebed with the sort of windborne/impact-flung material that filled Gusev, or in mass movement from the delta deposits, which are still relatively far away.

I suspect that not much of what we're seeing within 50 meters of the rover now ever touched the lake that was here. That will change profoundly as we approach the delta. I'd be happy to be proven wrong about the first part.

That looks very much like lens flare.

The small cliffs on the delta remind me of Victoria crater's rim.

Wasn't this supposed to be a lava flow? The stuff in the foreground looks sedimentary. I recall some rocks from Gale Crater near Glenelg that looked a lot like reef rock but turned out to be mudstone with vugs. In the background there are some angular black shards that could be basalt thrown out of a crater.

The 2015 literature interpreted the immediate area of the landing site (as well as quite a bit that's around it) as "volcanic flow" but a 2020 USGS work calls it "volcanic ash or eolian airfall deposit that drapes underlying topography."

So, as I'd posited earlier, I don't think much of what we see soon is likely to be related to the aqueous environment that Perseverance came to Jezero for. Maybe some baubles here and there that took a curious journey?

https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/sim3464

"Volcanic ash or eolian airfall deposit that drapes underlying topography. Correlates with unit Nnp2 based on common stratigraphic position and shared textural and morphologic characteristics. Emplaced during the Late Noachian before deposition of unit NHjf1. May have been modified by subsequent lacustrine activity during deposition of units NHjf1 and NHjf2. Dark, smooth surface texture near unit NHjf2 is due to a dark mantle deposit or erosional lag derived from erosion of unit NHjf2. Previously interpreted by Schon and others (2012) and Goudge and others (2015) as an extrusive volcanic flow."

I think we are on the Nle unit which is mid-Noachian and therefore really old. If that is correct then these might be the oldest rocks ever visited by a Mars rover.

They do mention carbonates associated with some of the crater floor units. When I saw the light tone of the rocks I thought about carbonate, but I suppose it is more likely to be volcanic ash that got saturated in water producing the vugs.

It'll do for instrument tests. I'm quite curious to see how the new tech preforms, especially the Raman. Then they can head for the delta.

A rough reprojection of the current hazcam views gives a nice view of the landing site - north approximately at the top.

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The delta edge is clear with the hills of Jezero's rim behind it (height exaggerated in this projection). At lower right the forward view includes some bright rocky patches among the drifts which made the location clear to me. This is a HiRISE image (number in the file name if you save it) with Percy superimposed at close to the correct size and orientation.

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Phil

Bravo Phil.... that is beautiful!
Plenty of flat space around to launch a chopper.

Few pictures I did after the release of the first batch of "raw" images



And Sol 2 (just RGB, no reprojections) :





All I can say is those camera are AMAZING ! And the pictures we have are just downsampled versions. Can't wait for the full sampled !

Yep, interesting though, without any holes, the interior of the wheels should eventually accumulate heavy materials like panning for gold, and act like a slow motion "gem tumbler" to wear off "desert varnish" eventually revealing the underlying mineralogy.


On the other hand for "a curious journey" after seeing the "eccentrics" I couldn't help but think of "racetrack playa" where large rocks embedded in ice move impossibly long distances across an ephemeral lake in a normally dry lakebed.
Which raises the possibility that those eccentrics are "depth charges" i.e. rocks deposited onto the frozen surface of the lake which eventually melt through the ice and fall to the lake bottom.

Feb. 22, Monday
2 p.m. EST – Mars 2020 Perseverance briefing (All Channels)

Maybe we'll get some images from the mast cameras. The hazard cameras are better than those of Curiosity, and the protective covers did their job preventing lens damage during powered descent.

Here is my take on these marvelous first Hazcam pictures. Correction of the vignetting, of the lens distorsion and levels.
That's such a lovely place!

There may be some interesting stories for individual rocks, but I have trouble seeing how any lake-related rocks would be near Perseverance now. Some rocks surely made it to the bottom of the lake when it existed, but there have been billions of years of aeolian and impact deposit after the lake was gone, and the depth of the deposit is probably much greater than the diameter of any individual rock.

Perhaps a rock rolled off the deposit at considerable velocity, but there's a lot of dusty ground for any such rock to roll hundreds of meters.

If I had to guess, out of any hundred rocks around Perseverance now, how many are lake-related, I'd bet on zero. If there are any, though, they have an interesting story behind them.

I'm really looking forward seeing the landing video!!!

here's a geologic map of Jezero:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/cms...-fig-0004-m.jpg

If my bearings are correct, we are on what is called the Volcanic Floor, which was post-depositional to the delta-fan units.
The map is from this paper: Assessing the mineralogy of the watershed and fan deposits of the Jezero crater paleolake system, Mars by Goudge et al

Great images Thomas!


Here are two enhanced resolution images (using super-resolution techniques) from front and rear hazcams:

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It just keeps speaking to me...

There was a rock at the Pathfinder site called 'Mini-Matterhorn'.

Phil

Yikes those are impressive. I was thinking that, since the R, G, and B frames are subsamples of different pixels on the original Bayer sensor, there should be some way of recovering more resolution from them. Did you take advantage of the RGGB pattern or is that generic super-resolution?

You guys keep mentioning these Pathfinder names, and it keeps reminding me of downloading some basic HTML tables of thumbnails on pink webpages over dialup. That was a lot cooler than getting AW&ST from the library.

Holy **** these videos :0

Astounding!

Thanks!

It's generic super-resolution which takes advantage of the RGGB patern.
(At least I suppose that's the case.)
Better SNR thanks to summing images also helps with processing.

The supersonic parachute in action:

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They hinted there may be a message in there, where are the crypto guys

Yup! https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-mars-pe...g-of-red-planet

The loose spring rolling around the heat shield was an interesting detail they pointed out...