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Whirr, click, click Whirr, click, click Zzzz … Whirr, click, click. Zzzzz … My Dear Flying Friend, It’s been too long since we last saw each other. Now I hear we will be meeting soon At Tenby, in the middle of the Delta And I am running like crazy (just did 655.8m by myself today, a PB) To meet you there. You are a Feature of my Future Is a machine not the purest friend a...

As Perseverance celebrates its second anniversary on Mars, our team is reflecting on the rover’s remarkable journey so far. In the past two years, Perseverance has collected 18 Martian samples, traversed over 9 miles, transmitted over 200,000 images to Earth, supported the Ingenuity helicopter with its 42 flights, and much more. Now, after spending nearly 6 weeks creating the Three Forks sample...

A momentous accomplishment occurred last week when Perseverance completed the Three Forks Sample Depot on the floor of Jezero Crater, the only known sample depot in the universe. I had the opportunity to work Perseverance science operations the day the final sample drop was planned, and it was an unforgettable experience. The excitement when planning the final drop, from those that have been wa...

Mars clouds are very much like Earth’s cirrus clouds but thinner. While Earth clouds can contain liquid water, the low temperatures and pressures on Mars only allow for water-ice (and CO2 ice) clouds to form. However, these water-ice clouds are optically thin because of the low amounts of water present in the Martian atmosphere; if all the water were on the surface, it would make a layer thinne...

What do the Perseverance rover and Superman have in common? They both can “see” through solid rock! Superman has X-ray vision whereas Perseverance has RIMFAX, a ground penetrating radar or GPR, located on the lower rear of the rover. RIMFAX uses radio waves to image the subsurface rock layers as the rover drives along. It is the first instrument of its kind sent by NASA to Mars and can “see” do...

Happy one Martian year at Jezero! Perseverance and the team recently celebrated one Mars year (668 sols or 687 Earth days) on the Red Planet while continuing to offload some of our sample tubes at the “Three Forks” depot location. The celebration also marked the end of our prime mission at Jezero as we transition into our extended mission phase and set our sights on the delta top. It has be...

What do you see in the picture above - an abandoned lightsaber dropped by a Jedi Knight, lying forgotten amidst the Tattoine sand? It may look like a scene straight out of Star Wars, but sometimes life imitates art. The apparent “lightsaber” is actually an ~18 cm (~7 in) long sample tube holding a rock core drilled by NASA’s Perseverance rover, collected from Jezero Crater, Mars, for potential ...

Perseverance has a unique device near its heart that inhales Mars’ atmosphere and exhales pure oxygen. This device is named MOXIE, the Mars Oxygen In Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. The toaster-sized MOXIE uses a high-temperature, electrochemical process called solid oxide electrolysis to strip oxygen ions from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mars. There are two little gas exit po...

Recently a combination of instruments on the Perseverance rover has experienced a dust devil in a new way. The SuperCam Microphone recorded the sound of a dust devil while the navigation camera snapped pictures and the MEDA environmental station measured the drop in pressure as the dust devil passed over rover. The recording even catches the sound of dust grains hitting the rover. The results w...

The Perseverance rover recently collected its first two samples of Martian regolith!  Regolith is dust and broken rock, and collecting it requires a different approach than collecting rock cores. To start with, regolith sampling uses a different bit than rock sampling.  The back of the regolith bit is very similar to a coring bit – it uses the same type of sample tube and interfaces with the...