I would like to announce our "sister" Lemmy Community About Curiosity who is roaming Gale Crater since 2012. ![email protected]

NASA’s Perseverance rover appears as a green speck on the Martian surface on June 13, 2026, a day before the robotic explorer marked a distance milestone, having traveled a full marathon (26.2 miles, or 42.195 kilometers) on the Red Planet. Perseverance reached that distance after five years and four months of driving — on the 1,890th Martian day, or sol, of its mission; the previous record holder, NASA’s Opportunity rover, took 11 years and two months to reach the same milestone.

This image was taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) using its High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. The rover’s tracks can be seen tracing the surface. The rover is in an area west of Jezero Crater that the science team is calling “Arbot.”

Figure A is the same image with a yellow circle indicating Perseverance.

Managed for NASA by Caltech, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California manages operations of the Perseverance rover and MRO on behalf of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built MRO and supports its operations. The University of Arizona, in Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado.

cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/39584904

post-drive NavCam

Episode 271

Decades ago, a trick of the light and a low-resolution image produced the infamous Face on Mars. Multiple books and movies followed. A new image from Perseverance doesn't quite rival the Face, but it does offer some Escher-esque visual trickery.

I've never seen a mosaic line up this well in the raw images.

Credit: NASA JPL

Only possible in Mars climate and gravity?

This is all taken from data released by JPL a short time after each drive

4-tile L-NavCam acquired at the end of the drive on sol 1883

Episode 270 Hypervelocity impacts by asteroids, and more rarely comets, can excavate a huge hole in the ground and also generate instant lava by melting the target rocks. Jezero crater should have abundant impact melt and now Perseverance may have found some.

End of drive tiled NavCam looking back after a drive of ~45 minutes, heading was Southeast

4-tile L-NavCam taken after the drive to the Southeast with a large rock in the rover's robotic arm workspace

Episode 269

The accumulation of dust donuts on the color calibration targets used by cameras on Perseverance means that Martian dust is behaving as expected. It also reveals a fundamental difference between dust on Mars and Earth. Our dust doesn’t behave this way.

Mars Perseverance Sol 1875: Right Mastcam-Z Camera (processed)

NASA's Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image using its Right Mastcam-Z camera. Mastcam-Z is a pair of cameras located high on the rover's mast.

This image was acquired on May 30, 2026 (Sol 1875) at the local mean solar time of 13:08:39.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Camera at full zoom (110mm)

mastAz: "-26.7665"

mastEl: "-10.1556"

sclk: "833395048.333"

xyz: "(-82.9081,9.23729,-9.94973)"

dimension: "(1648,1200)"

filter_name: "ZCAM_R0_RGB"

16-tile NavCam acquired earlier today (May 28, 2026 - Sol 1873)

The SHERLOC WATSON camera is mounted on the rover's turret which is placed close to the patch to obtain these close up images.

For scale: the diameter of the abrasion patch is 50mm (~2 inches)

A processed 4-tile front-left HazCam image.

We can see one of the rover's cameras that's mounted on the turret, is acquiring close up images of the patch. We're waiting for those close-up images to be downlinked.

For scale the abraded patch is 5 centimeters (2 inches) in diameter

The raw images were a little overexposed, I've corrected that in this post.

Sol 1867 - 4-tile Left-NavCam post-drive image