https://bit.ly/PercyMAP was updated to include a transparent, 5m tall flight zone. It is currently affected by vertical exaggeration along with the topography.

Little Ingenuity is ca. at the center of the designated airfield, 4m above ground.

Click to view attachment

Possible meteorite?

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/r...AM03108_1100LUJ

Maybe! It's the same one noted earlier but seen more clearly. Get that laser on it!
Phil

It's the same one. they imaged it with a suite of filters, those that know how to interpret those may likely already know if it's Fe-Ni.
My hat is still on the table for eating, but I think I'm safe
EDIT: James Sorenson just told me to look closer at the image. It's already been zapped with SuperCam

It was 5 x 3 dust devil survey. You don't need wide angle to film Ingenuity - they'll be parked >100m away and it's only going 5m high.

Ah, good to know there are such dust devil surveys, especially when they are successful. I think the distance from the Van Zyl overlook to the airfield is about 60m. Would such a distance require a wider than normal field of view for a full length flight down the flight zone ? Certainly not for the initial up and down flights.

The 60m length of the flight zone would subtend around 37 deg from Van Zyl, so easily within the 96 deg horizontal FOV of navcam but outside the max 25.6 deg for MCZ (though with a 2.3 deg toe-in between L and R I guess you could push that a bit).

We'd probably not hear the crunches, splinters and squishes from that over the usual assortment of clangs, sproings, crunches and whirs from the Rover.

--Bill

MastcamZ L+R Sol 36

It looks so shiny like Heat Shield Rock! Can we stuff a piece of it into a tube?

Sadly, no.
There's a reason the MERs never used the RAT on the various metallic meteorites they found; the sparks would have flown! I doubt Perseverance's coring instrument was rated for anything particularly hard; the samples worth collecting are going to be much softer types.

This is also a demonstration of the difference in impact flux between Earth and Mars; every mobile surface mission has come across several during their travels. A combination of the thin atmosphere and being on the asteroid belt's inner edge. Even Antarctica can't compete for meteorite hunting.....

I'd suspect that Rovers have found frequent meteorites because the iron meteorites would tend to be more resistant to chemical and physical weathering, as well aeolian erosion, than the basalt or weakly cemented sedimentary rocks typically present on Mars.

Also, erosion rates are much slower on Mars so the surfaces are much older than any terrestrial surface, and have just had more time to accumulate meteorites.

John

And I think they'd need a stable target to drill into anyway, not a loose rock.

Time to check the wheels!

Well, it's been 39 Sols, and although the rover hasn't really travelled that much, how are the wheels holding up?

Well, very well indeed.

The only obvious anomalies I found are highlighted. The yellow circled area seems to show some "scuff marks". The yellow rectangle shows some loss of the outer layer.

There is also a good sized rock in the wheel (arrow), which as someone previously mentioned, should get polished nicely:

Click to view attachment

Here's a blowup of the scuff marks:

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All things considered, there's not much to complain about.

Original image

Hi Marvin,
I think that the 'scuff marks' are just the underlying color of the wheel (blackish)
There appears to be a very fine layer of Mars dust clinging to the wheel (except for the scuff marks and such that you point out)

Note the color of the near-pristine wheels on the sky-crane:
Click to view attachment

And the almost-pristine wheels after landing (note the black color on top and the red/brown dust clinging to the bottom of the wheel):
Click to view attachment

By the time Percy rolls around, the wheel appears all rusty red-brownish (your images)

That rock will surely get tumbled and probably stay in the wheel -- the fine dust may get blown out -- eventually -- maybe

Nothing exposed is pristine after a dynamic landing on dusty Mars...

Interesting how the fine dust sticks to things.

Thanks for the feedback.

It's also thought Martian dust is electrostatically charged which also helps it stick to surfaces.

Sol 38



and its anaglyph

Yes! Thank you! In the early days of the mission, I looked all over for some red-green anaglyphs that I could use for sharing with colleagues (on my office door, glasses provided), and had given up. This one is great!

I am pretty sure that the constant bombardment by solar radiation and ultraviolet light would do that by stripping electrons off the top layer.

Supercam images showing up now:

What a pleasure to play with color RMI (Supercam) images! Here pictures focused on the delta, taken on sol 26 with Mastcam-Z for context:

A detail of the meteorite (or what it looks like)

This is the sol 43 panorama in circular form.
Phil
Click to view attachment

Sol 38 anaglyph view of the debris shield lying on the Martian surface. Part of the belly pan is also visible behind a rock a bit to the right.
Click to view attachment

The greatest factor hindering meteorite detection on Earth is that meteorites often blend into the scenery. This is why Antarctica and certain deserts are attractive places to look for them and much of the terrain of Earth makes meteorite hunting very difficult. This is why iron meteorites are discovered at a much greater rate than stony ones, relative to their intrinsic abundance, and why – as I read relatively recently – no martian meteorites have ever been discovered in Europe or North America (perhaps this is also true of South America).

So, Mars makes for a good place for lots of meteorites to stand out.

There was a very small move on sol 44, really just a turn in place to reveal Ingenuity, which was hidden by the back of the rover at the end of soil 43.

Phil

This is the view on sol 44 showing the effect of the turn in place.
Phil
Click to view attachment

Sol 45 Selfie roughly assembled / processed preview.
The full version will be EPIC
Click to view attachment

A part of the first self-portrait :

How You Doin'?

Good work! I add my contribution with the identification of the different instruments/cameras on the head and part of the mast, and a GIF.
SuperCam points to where the green laser (Raman spectroscopy) is emitted.


Click to view attachment

A stone seems to be stuck onto the wheel, casting quite a shadow. I wonder if it penetrated the wheel skin ?

Are you talking about that Watson sensor crud that's in every Watson image?

Sol 46 Selfie with chopper

Until We Meet Again

It seems so...

Sol 46 full Watson mosaic. A very nice (and maybe cute ?) scenery



Edit to add the Postcard version :

The helicopter, the rover, the landing site scour marks, the tracks.... best panorama of the mission so far! Well done all!

Really nice work Sean and Damia!
Here is my take:





And a GIF with the two orientations of the head:

Click to view attachment

When I saw this image of the turret from Sol 46, I noticed that on the right side, below the white rectangular PIXL is a grey ball!

What is it?

Click to view attachment

Just in case you were also wondering, it's part of a tool designed to remove dust from abraded surfaces for better imaging. It's called gDRT, which stands for Gas Dust Removal Tool.

The ball itself is a suppy tank that holds nitrogen which is expelled from a nozzle (just below the ball in the above image):

Click to view attachment

Here is the before and after of gDRT in action when tested on Earth:

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Source

Photoelectron emission is indeed likely to be important at the Martian surface. There's another effect which I wonder might be important, namely ionization by radiation from the MMRTG. It would enhance the electrical conductivity of the atmosphere around the rover, allowing charges to dissipate faster, and thus I could imagine the charging of solar-powered landers (and perhaps dust adhesion) could be different from radioisotope-powered ones. Havent seen any evidence to that effect, though - difficult to separate the geographical variation of dust deposition/removal from any possible systematic variation with lander power type.

Here's my first submission, a slightly dramatic stretch of the sol 46 self portrait.

Here, our version of the selfie (we prefer when Perseverance looks into the camera!)

Before driving away on sol 47, Perseverance captured what appears to be the unlocking of the rotors
2 frame L-Mstcam-Z GIF
Click to view attachment

Nice closeup!
Dust is already accumulating on the solar panel. Hopefully the flight will shake it off. Another experiment...
Fernando

That dust looks consistent with the first images, so probably squeezed in during landing - see the helicopter thread discussion.

Is this you?

https://www.space.com/mars-rover-perseveran...ingenuity-photo