NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover

This close-up view of a plate on NASA's Perseverance rover commemorating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and paying tribute to the perseverance of health care workers around the world was acquired on June 28, 2025 (the 1,548th day, or sol, of its mission to Mars).

Located on the left side of the rover chassis, the 3-by-5-inch (8-by-13-centimeter) aluminum plaque was attached in May 2020 during final assembly at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The image was captured by the rover's WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) imager, part of an instrument called SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals). WATSON was built by Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) in San Diego and is operated jointly by MSSS and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

The drilling process was seemingly not the smoothest:

Difficult to tell from CacheCam if the sample tube is full, and we have no animation of the drilling process as yet. Stay tuned!

Cropped 6-tile NavCam, shows the rover's new workspace while looking South-southeast after a very short move. The team advanced the RMC site number which sometimes points to a potential sample site. Recent attempts to abrade this type of rock have not been fully successful as the surface of the rock has fractured badly. The observant will notice that the surface of this rock was fractured at some point, maybe it's better cemented compared with those earlier attempts. Watch this space and see what happens next.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Hopefully this data is presented in a form that folk can understand. However, if it does not make sense please let me know, and I'll answer any questions.

The raw drive data is provided by JPL shortly after each drive, all I do is extract the data from the JSON feeds and present it in this table

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Composite image using 6 overlapping processed NavCam tiles acquired after the drive to site 76.594. Roughly assembled in MS-ICE. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The drive path is highlighted yellow

The details are extracted from JPL's public JSON URLs that provide waypoint and traverse data, these are updated shortly after each drive. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Three sols after the first (messy, unsuccessful) attempt to abrade another rock in this clay-bearing region of the crater rim, Percy has made a second attempt, less than a metre away.

This target seems not to have fractured and broken as quickly and easily as the previous stuff, but this latest attempt ended after only 13 minutes - shorter than the usual 15-25 minutes required at other abrasion sites, but longer than the previous one, which ended after only 10 minutes. I'm wondering if the rover was programmed to use less force with this abrasion; if so, the results so far are not encouraging.

Mars is hard. Even when it's not.

In addition to drilling rock core samples, the science team has been grinding its way into rocks to make sense of the scientific evidence hiding just below the surface.

No image of a freshly abraded rock has been uploaded to the JPL server as yet, and we've only received 10 frames of the abrasion operation so far (spanning about 10 minutes of work), so I'm not sure what to think. Did the rover sense a problem and end the abrasion early? As the animation shows, the arm and the abrasion bit actually shifted a bit during the operation, which is not unprecedented, but it may be that Percy stopped as a precaution.

All the other recent abrasions took longer than 10 minutes (between 15-25), so I can imagine that the process wouldn't quite be done. ~~An earlier post by Paul Hammond shows that Percy is currently very close to the site of abrasion patch #40, which was evidently easier to work with than this weak, fractured stuff, though it was only metres away from here.~~

The rocks on this great big crater rim are yielding amazing science, but they are damned finicky to work with.

EDIT: As of this sol (1544), Percy is about ~100 m east of the site of abrasion patch #40, and ~100 m west of abrasion patch #38. My apologies for the error!

Annotated screen capture of the official map - Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/UofA

The raw data is provided by NASA/JPL after each drive

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

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/UofA

The drive distance may be amended later as there are 2 official data sources, and the one I don't usually use indicates the distance was a little longer at 405.49 m. I've decided to report on the shorter one for the time being

end-of-drive upper tier NavCam looking south after the second longest daily drive since landing. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Two images of the Nili Plateau landscape to the west of the rover: one taken at about 1:30 PM local time, the other at about 7 PM, in early summer.

The evening shadows really give the landscape a definition and intrigue which the hazy afternoon sun barely hints at, with even small pebbles standing out, and those sandy mega-ripples down below much more easily identified in the distance.

OTOH, I find that the rover tracks (on the right) become harder to see in the evening, so your hiking skills and common sense are key on late-day excursions. You definitely don't want to be lost in this landscape after dark as temperatures quickly head for -100 ºC...

Perseverance rover acquired this image of the coring bit located in the Carousel using its SHERLOC WATSON camera, located on the turret at the end of the rover's robotic arm. The image has been rotated to correct the orientation of the carousel.

This image was acquired on June 18, 2025 (Sol 1538) at the local mean solar time of 15:21:21.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Perseverance rover acquired this image using its onboard Sample Caching System Camera (CacheCam), located inside the rover underbelly. It looks down into the top of a sample tube to take close-up pictures of the sampled material and the tube as it's prepared for sealing and storage.

The tube can be reused for further coring attempts

This image was acquired on June 18, 2025 (Sol 1538) at the local mean solar time of 14:28:07.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Perseverance rover acquired this image using its Left Mastcam-Z camera at full zoom. Mastcam-Z is a pair of cameras located high on the rover's mast. No obvious damage is seen and they managed to remove the coring bit that was being used when the coring operation shattered the bedrock.

This image was acquired on June 18, 2025 (Sol 1538) at the local mean solar time of 15:08:18.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU