No image of a freshly abraded rock has been uploaded to the JPL server as yet, and we’ve only received 10 frames of the abrasion operation so far (spanning about 10 minutes of work), so I’m not sure what to think. Did the rover sense a problem and end the abrasion early? As the animation shows, the arm and the abrasion bit actually shifted a bit during the operation, which is not unprecedented, but it may be that Percy stopped as a precaution.

All the other recent abrasions took longer than 10 minutes (between 15-25), so I can imagine that the process wouldn’t quite be done. An earlier post by Paul Hammond shows that Percy is currently very close to the site of abrasion patch #40, which was evidently easier to work with than this weak, fractured stuff, though it was only metres away from here.

The rocks on this great big crater rim are yielding amazing science, but they are damned finicky to work with.

EDIT: As of this sol (1544), Percy is about ~100 m east of the site of abrasion patch #40, and ~100 m west of abrasion patch #38. My apologies for the error!

  • SpecialSetOfSieves@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    I’ll cheat, rather than taking the bet. 😁

    The SHERLOC team usually takes two images of a target before abrading (the close-up at a ~5 cm standoff, the wide-angle at ~25 cm), which is what this shot (close-up) and this shot (wide-angle), taken on Sol 1545, appear to be.

    On casual inspection, I don’t see much difference between this new possible target and the one that didn’t work out on 1544 (close-up here, wide-angle here), but… I’d really like to abrade this stuff, too. This clay-bearing unit we seem to be driving on makes a nice contrast with the failed abrasion site higher up on the rim, where the rock was actually too hard to abrade, and sure seems different from the almost rhythmic material down on the flat…

    Still can’t believe we’ve been set free to rove on Nili Planum.