Where No Man has Trod:

[beecee]

https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/26616/perseverance-looks-toward-santa-cruz/

February 14, 2022

Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory performed tests on rocks such as this one to understand why the first attempt by the agency’s Perseverance rover resulted in a powderized sample. A duplicate of the rover’s drill attempted to create cores from crumbly rocks.

A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

For more about Perseverance:

mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

nasa.gov/perseverance

March 01, 2022

Smaller than a penny, the flower-like rock artifact on the left was imaged by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover using its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera on the end of its robotic arm. The image was taken on Feb. 24, 2022, the 3,396th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The “flower,” along with the spherical rock artifacts seen to the right, were made in the ancient past when minerals carried by water cemented the rock. Figure A shows a tighter view of the flower-like feature.

Clouds can be seen drifting across the Martian sky in an 8-frame movie made using images from a navigation camera aboard NASA’s Curiosity rover. Shadows from these clouds can be seen drifting across the terrain. These images were taken on Dec. 12, 2021, the 3,325th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.

A second 8-frame movie, taken using the same navigation camera, is included here as Figure A. These images show the clouds as they were seen drifting directly above Curiosity. Scientists can calculate how fast the clouds are moving – and how high they are in the sky – by comparing the two perspectives. These clouds are very high, nearly 50 miles (80 kilometers) above the surface. It’s extremely cold at that height, which suggests these clouds are composed of carbon dioxide ice as opposed to water ice clouds, which are typically found at lower altitude.

Martian clouds are very faint in the atmosphere, so special imaging techniques are needed to see them. Multiple images are taken to be able to get a clear, static background. That allows anything else moving within the image (like clouds or shadows) to become visible after subtracting this static background from each individual image.

https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/26557/curiosity-captures-drifting-clouds-on-dec-12-2021/