this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover
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On the plains of Jezero, the secrets of Mars' past await us! Follow for the latest news, updates, pretty pics, and community discussion on NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's most ambitious mission to Mars!
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I'm not often surprised anymore by whitish or light-toned materials near a rover since Spirit uncovered all that whitish silica with its dragging dead front wheel, all those years ago. It seems we often find that Mars is red only until you literally scratch the surface.
I have to say that Percy often drives right past plenty of rocks I'd like to investigate more. I know that Ken Farley et al. are doing just that with remote sensing (the results of which we aren't privy to for quite a while), so they have some idea of what they're looking at, but I'm often tantalized by a lot of this stuff.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall at the meetings between the science teams on which rocks to investigate. There must be disagreements between the scientists :) I guess we would have only travelled a few hundred meters if they stopped at every rock / target that looked interesting to one of the team, instead of the 32.51 km (20.20 miles) we have traversed. As for the colour, I like to look at the colour of the tailings when they drill holes, there are many gray rocks, but quite a few reddish ones as well. This illustrates it well for me (all 42 sample holes) https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA26403.jpg
While I'm being chatty, I'd like to ask you if you have any suggestions re: contributions to this community or instance or whatever we call it. I often see things in the raw images that I feel like pointing out here. In reading social media since this mission started, though, I see vast knowledge gaps in people's understanding of basic geology (or "earth sciences", if we can use that term for Mars - maybe "environmental sciences" is a better term), and I sometimes feel I should try to shine a light in those gaps. I've thought about breaking down some of the big science papers/results from this mission here, but I wanted to ask you about this first, as I think you have a better feel than I for what people might be interested in actually reading.
I'm sure there are a lot of folk that would appreciate and be very interested in any contributions you make, where you could shine a light on the many gaps there are in their understanding. It's probably not something you can measure in counting lots of upvotes on particular, but I'm pretty sure there is an audience out there for you.... Go for it whenever you see feature in any of the raw images or breaking down the results of a paper...