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A new abrasion patch imaged on May 25, 2026 (Sol 1870)
(lemmy.world)
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.
I feel a little out of touch, thank you for the detail. Paul, your posts are always appreciated.
That data was taken from JPL's 5 Interim Sample Reports that are lodged in the mission PDS as PDF files, and as such does not include any failed attempts to capture a core sample as that detail is not always recorded.
They've not been coring for quite some time as they have limited tubes left, so they've just been scouting and abrading. Because of the political uncertainty of funding for a mission to retrieve the samples, I can only assume there is no rush to core / seal any tubes at this time, so we're likely to see the scouting continue for some time.
One of the posters to this community is compiling a huge collection of data from the >50 abrasion patches created during this mission, it will make a hugely interesting source for mission nerds to check out once completed
Check his posts on: https://lemmy.world/u/SpecialSetOfSieves?page=2&sort=New&view=Posts