I'm not sure. In the case of Perseverance, I know that they block out those goddamned instances when the sandworms photobomb the panoramas, but I don't blame JPL for that - those things are repulsive.

We do know that Curiosity has some overly aggressive tendencies when it comes to small furry mammals. I hope the rover AI hasn't gone on another rampage and tried to hide the evidence again. It takes months to remove the organic matter contamination from the instruments.

All of that being said, I can imagine that there could be some utility in operating a rover prototype in the lab or in a sandbox via a gaming device like this. It would have some advantages over a laptop, assuming the wireless connection is solid and latency is low.

Provided the Steam Deck is in the same room as the rover, not 200 million km away.

It's not often that I downvote anything posted to this community, but I've done so here. A few notes of caution about this article are required:

• It contains no mention whatsoever of Curiosity, Perseverance or any rover currently scheduled for launch to Mars, let alone one currently operating on the planet
• The time delay for signals between Earth and Mars is currently ~17 minutes - that's one way - and is never less than ~4. I don't think thumbsticks, face buttons or a handheld screen are going to mitigate that. Your refresh rate is going to be just a bit short of 60 FPS. Unless the Steam Deck/tablet/PC can violate relativity.
• Remotely operated ground vehicles on other planets (with the possible exception of Luna) are semi-autonomous, in the sense that they drive themselves to locations that the scientists direct them to. Geologists choose a point in the landscape where they want to the rover to go, then the rover chooses a path through the landscape via image analysis. Rover "drivers" (AKA Rover Planners) can issue a "directed drive" command, i.e. manually pre-planning the route, but the autonomous capability ("AutoNav") is commonly used for longer drives.
• We are not in continuous communication with any Mars rover, lander or orbiter. Interplanetary communication for landed vehicles works like this: Rover uploads to Mars-orbiting satellite, via its weak transmitter --> Mars-orbiting satellite transmits to Earth, via its stronger transmitter --> Absurdly powerful ground-based receiver on Earth captures signal --> Data packet from rover is transmitted to control center. In the case of uploading commands, the sequence is reversed. Please note that all of this requires the satellite at Mars to actually pass over the rover's location, preferably directly overhead (not always the case). This entire sequence can happen, at most, a few times a day, but generally it happens once or twice.
• Using handheld devices to plan the rover's route (in the case of the engineers) or review the rover's data and photos (in the case of the scientists) makes little sense. Larger displays are clearly better for this task, where mapping and visualization are essential. The complex software suites that the engineers use to plan the rover's drives aren't going to be better suited to a video game controller than they are to a mouse and keyboard.

In short, the suggestion that a handheld gaming device would be used for operating a currently active spacecraft, lander or rover is absurd.

JPL actually released some of the software that they used to plan drives for Spirit and Opportunity, but they haven't done so for the current rover missions.

I would absolutely adore anything that simulates actually rover planning and driving.

Abrasion date and location

Date: Sol 1931 (Ls 325º, Year 38) / (26 July 2026)
Campaign: Crater Rim (33rd abrasion)
Location: Nili Planum/Lac de Charmes
Elevation: 1959 metres below datum
Map Quadrangle: Forêts
RMC Site: 89_4246
Site Arrival: Sol 1927
Site Departure: Sol 1935

Associated samples

None

Geology

Mapped unit:
Formation: Undefined
Rock Type:
Interpretation:
Chisel marks: Yes (prominent)

Mission analysis

Blog entries: None
Depth of abrasion: ?
Night-time LED images: Sols
Flourescent images: Sol
Abrasion animation: Yes
PIXL images:
SuperCam images:

Abrasion date and location

Date: Sol 1914 (Ls 315º, Year 38) / (9 July 2026)
Campaign: Crater Rim (32nd abrasion)
Location: Nili Planum/Lac de Charmes
Elevation: 1973 metres below datum
Map Quadrangle: Forêts
RMC Site: 89_2556
Site Arrival: Sol 1913
Site Departure: Sol 1917

Associated samples

None

Geology

Mapped unit:
Formation: Undefined
Rock Type:
Interpretation:
Chisel marks: Yes (prominent)

Mission analysis

Blog entries: None
Depth of abrasion: ?
Night-time LED images: Sols
Flourescent images: Sol
Abrasion animation: Yes
PIXL images:
SuperCam images:

And destroyers.

Just a few months into its reign, the US regime intends to ruin decades of progress in science and space exploration:

On May 30, 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget announced a plan to cancel no less than 41 space missions — including spacecraft already paid for, launched, and making discoveries — as part of a devastating 47% cut to the agency’s science program. If enacted, this plan would decimate NASA. It would fire a third of the agency’s staff, waste billions of taxpayer dollars, and turn off spacecraft that have been journeying through the Solar System for decades.

Shutting down a working, completely functional mission like New Horizons, in particular, that may just be on the cusp of a huge discovery - it has seen signs of a new, second "ring" to the Kuiper Belt - is the ultimate repudiation of the American self-image as explorers of the frontier. And all of this at a time when the Chinese are just about catching up to "the West" in space science prowess.

As a kid, I never understood what the Romans were trying to say with their Janus myth. Turns out that Orange Janus is simply the god of endings.

It wasn't even a trip into orbit. Their rather short voyage was a sub-orbital hop. A low orbit of Earth requires a speed on the order of 8 km per second - Blue Origin can make about Mach 3, from what I read, which is circa 1 km per second. You go up, you go down. That's it. They don't even go particularly high (~100 km), and the apogee doesn't keep you "above the atmosphere" (LOL) for long. Given the risks, I'm not sure it's worth it, personally.

If we really want to inspire people by pointing out women's accomplishments in spaceflight and space exploration, maybe we should be talking about people like Eileen Collins (astronaut on key shuttle/station missions), Lindy Elkin-Stanton (science lead for Psyche, the first to a metallic asteroid), Maria Zuber (lead the GRAIL mission to the Moon, co-discovered the rifts in the Ocean of Storms), or Mimi Aung (lead engineer for the Ingenuity 'copter on Mars 2020). And I've only mentioned a few Americans with recent work here; the rest of the world has plenty of enterprising female space scientists and aerospace engineers.

I share the general distaste in this thread and on Lemmy generally for this sort of celebrity stunt, and I'm glad to see the criticism. I do sometimes think, however, that for a certain kind of person, Bezos and Musk are becoming associated or even synonymous with spaceflight/exploration generally, which is a dangerous association to make. People have many, diverse and very legitimate reasons for going to space - there's a lot more going on than joyrides and ego trips.

Well. This is quite a pearl.

I don't have time to read a 16-page paper in detail, but I did want to know how the host star compares to everyone's favourite local solitary K-type dwarf, Epsilon Eridani. It's slightly less massive (~0.7 solar mass versus 0.8 for ε Eri) and quite a bit less bright (difference of about 0.1 solar luminosity), but I especially wanted to know about the age of the star. ε Eri is quite young and frothy, but the investigators here infer from the star's motion that it belongs to the thin disk, up to a whopping 10 billion years old.

So we are definitely not talking about an ε Eri-type system. So that should be mean no dust disks, no crazy activity from the star, and no newish planets still carving out their places through the system.

You've really got to wonder about such an old planet, however cold and quiescent it may be. The potential paths for climatic evolution on such a world boggle the mind, however cold it is. You could get an episodically or formerly active world like Mars, a beautifully unstable oscillatory world like Earth, or something completely different. Assuming any atmosphere, of course (safe assumption?). And that's without considering whether there are any other planets in the system.

I really wouldn't spend too much time thinking about this candidate detection, as we have literally seen just the one transit, and we will need to observe this fellow for a while to confirm the discovery, learn about other planets in the system, and so on. The investigators themselves note that the transit was shallow (meaning difficult to detect), but the good news is that the host star is fairly bright, well within reach of amateur equipment. I wonder if citizen scientists will be able to follow the transits.

Exciting times.

Some notes --

I have struggled to find earlier MastCam images of this difficult-to-reach part of Percy, but I will post updates if I find any. The science team doesn't image this part of the rover deck very often - at least not of late:

This location at the base of the rover's "neck" (mast) appears partly sheltered from the wind, which is interesting.

Image sources:

Abrasion patch #2
Abrasion patch #18
"Bizarre" purple coating (left)
"Bizarre" purple coating (right)

my 250 million year old salt has expired

laughing in Martian

Yup, that's Earth alright. Rookie numbers, as usual.

well‐preserved, clay and carbonate‐bearing sedimentary fan deposit located on the western edge of the crater

This fan is estimated to have formed approximately 3.2–3.8 billion years ago when ancient streams flowed into the Jezero crater lake

Whether it's checking for sandworms or the Epstein files, I applaud the science team for this new, aggressive search tactic.

Lord Rayleigh disagrees, I'm afraid.

Sky colors are generally weather-dependent, even seasonal in nature. During dust storms (see, for example, the disastrous global storm of 2018) the sky gets darker and muddier. Cloudy days and evenings can add some different colors, and then of course there are the famous pale blue sunsets.

The question of whether Mars gets blue skies has been debated for decades. Personally, aside from the sunsets, I don't see what conditions could produce the blue skies you find on other worlds with much thicker atmospheres; the dust just never completely settles out enough to wash those reddish tones away altogether. The debate will continue, but there's probably only one to settle it - sending humans.

I should add that there are plenty of shots with the horizon included from every landed mission, in case you're curious.

This is one of the best dust devil videos ever captured, IMO. Spirit used to catch whole packs of them roaming the great prairie-like floor of Gusev Crater (back when that rover was perched up in the Columbia Hills, I believe), but this devil in the foreground here shows a lot of detail, and is quite close to the camera, unlike those in old shots from Spirit. From what I recall, Percy has been able to capture some nearby dust devils in similar detail, which is unsurprising given that the Jezero region is supposed to be the windiest site we've visited on Mars... but awesome nonetheless.

Just looking at the shadows it casts is very revealing, and watching the thick white patches of the vortex really gives you an idea of the turbulence involved here. It's really cool that we can see the entire length of the shadows being cast; I wonder if this is one reason why these shots were taken near noon, rather than later in the afternoon, around the time of maximum daily heating.

For scale, the crater at the bottom left is 300 m across from left to right, so you can tell that the "foot" of the foreground devil is quite a bit bigger than Percy itself. So much to see here!

😃 I hope some rover drivers get to see this question - it's a very good one, just funny if you've seen the whole mission.

In the past - before Curiosity landed - NASA definitely chose rover landing sites based in part on their (presumed) smoothness and traversability (e.g. Opportunity). This was also true for the first Chinese lander.

In the case of Perseverance, the "rockiness" in this region actually varies quite a bit over fairly short distances. The terrain we've been exploring since late 2024 was chosen for two reasons: ease of traversal (when we were climbing out of the Jezero Crater) and science (our current location, Witch Hazel Hill). When we were down on the old river delta last year, though, the rover drivers had a very difficult time with terrain like this and this.

Witch Hazel Hill is smooth in part because the bedrock here is soft and easily eroded. Quite a bit of it has significant clay content, like you'd find in Earth soils, due to heavy interaction with water in the geologic past. Down on the crater floor where we landed, where the terrain is made of volcanic rocks, there are scenes like this. In the end, the rover drivers are pretty protective of their vehicle, so we tend to prefer smooth stretches for driving.

In the USA we wasted time, money, and media resources going to the moon while black people were treated as less than citizens and millions were living in abject poverty. Not much has changed on that front for the countries entire history. What good did the moon landing do for the average man?

I'm sincerely wondering if you'd like an answer to your question. I can provide you the science perspective, if you like, not to mention a political one. Not interested in an emotional debate here, you're entitled to your point of view and your polemic, if that's all you prefer.

Everyone in this thread is approaching the question from the perspective of the passive resident role, and not the traveling science minstrel role.

Given that I am definitely more inclined toward the latter - which apparently makes me a tiny minority, even in this thread - I feel confident saying that I would have far more to fear from all of you than the reverse.

You may all point and laugh now.

In the last 48 h the JPL website has had trouble serving up the raw images page, which is pretty frustrating when you're working on any projects associated with this mission. Percy has already seen and done a lot in ~4 Earth years, so there is one hell of a lot to review if you're trying to be thorough...

Those four selfies that Paul links to above all represent significant mission milestones - the deployment of Ingenuity, our first sampling attempt, our finding of a "potential biosignature" down in the valley, and the rover at the sample depot.

Perhaps this latest one can be labeled "Perseverance's Pre-Budget Cut Selfie".