ZOMG

We’re actually backtracking!!! What have they done with Ken Farley - has he been kidnapped?? He’d never stand for actually going back and deviating from the Mission Plan…

One pill makes you larger

and one pill makes you small

and the ones that Mother gives you

Don’t do anything at all

When lost on another planet, our little green friend reminds us: Remember your training. Save you it can.

I’m not surprised that Mars Guy is going back to the textbook, so to speak, because we just don’t have experience with a geologic setting quite like this - the moderately well-preserved rim of a ~50 km-diameter impact crater - from prior Mars exploration or Apollo (Earth, of course, has done a lousy job of preserving craters of this size). The closest example is Opportunity’s exploration of Endeavour Crater, which is much smaller, with a far smoother, more degraded rim. Apollo 15 landed near the edge of the Apennine Mountains, formed by the immense Imbrium basin impact (~1100 km diameter), but the astronauts didn’t have the chance to ascend the foothills to any great height during their short and very busy stay. Opportunity had access to extensive outcroppings of bedrock at Endeavour, not to mention the kind of smooth, light-toned “paver stones” that Curiosity and Perseverance have been driving over for years. The Apollo astronauts saw nothing of the kind, unsurprisingly - the Moon being completely blanketed by that powdery surface.

Those other landing sites feature nothing quite like the distinct, boulder-studded knolls and ridges that Percy is investigating, which seem related to the original crater formation process itself. These gentle hills roughly follow the regional SW to NE trend of the rim mountain Percy is climbing (zoom in just a bit on the ESA map to see the steep face of the spur north of the rover), and several feature intact, massive blocks of bedrock that I’d love to sample (see Paul Hammond’s Pico Turquino post for the best example yet). Good episode by Mars Guy, and I can’t disagree with him here for the most part, but believe me, he isn’t laying the hardcore stuff on us yet: impact crater geology melts brains, not just rocks!

Correction: the image at bottom right was taken by one of the navigation cameras, which is located on the rover’s “head” or mast, unlike the body-mounted hazcams. The latest images include a couple of higher-res Mastcam-Z shots, so - more and better to come?

I’m afraid I can’t upvote this sentiment, Paul. I feel like we need to get you to, I don’t know, the Atacama? Utah, Kazakhstan, Western Australia? Nunavut, or the Dry Valleys? OK, all those places are a bit much on the oxygen and the humidity, and you wouldn’t be tasting the grit and dust in your mouth, but surely they could provide some respite to weary Martians? Dear planetary science community: remember the Paul Hammonds of this world as you work! We’re not mathematicians or pure theorists - planets fully engage the senses, and some people have been waiting a long time!

(TBH, I really go back and forth on the wisdom of sending astronauts ASAP, as certain incautious parties advocate. We should have done one sample return mission already - the easiest and arguably most relevant to astronaut safety was unwisely cancelled by NASA and has never been revisited, for reasons I can’t understand - and I long to get those cores from the Jezero basin back. I’d really give up a lot to have them, and I often think it’d be irresponsible to send people before we’ve assessed the toxicity of the regolith and dust. Still, the 1960s show me how important it is to have urgency, too. I’m assuming it was incredible fun to watch the entire lunar program evolve out of nothing, and even the Voyagers launched when they did to hit a deadline. I can’t imagine where this science would be without Apollo or Voyager!)

Are we really passing up all those tasty-textured boulders on the hill??

Come on, rover team! If you won’t give Percy the pleasure, send me! I’ll core those rocks for free. We really need astrogeologist boots on the ground…

Thanks for posting these. Do you prefer this JPL version of the overhead view to the contour-lined ESA one?

You mean you didn’t manage to get all your wheels dragged through slippery mud, or get sand sliding up and down your back for months at a time?

…

No wonder Percy hasn’t proven the case for biology yet. It’s too damned organic and sexy as it is. No witness tube can help the rover escape its own hot signal. That bot is living its best life!

You mean “notional path to the SSW”, Paul, no?

STOP STOP I’M GETTING A NOSEBLEED

(OK, I know Opportunity was a lot higher up in elevation. But that’s not a fair comparison - “Oppy” was born lucky and everybody knows it. The wind was always at that rover’s back and it never had to land in a 1500 km-wide hole punched out of the highlands…)