Perseverance rover acquired this image using its SHERLOC WATSON camera, located on the turret at the end of the rover's robotic arm.
This image was acquired on July 12, 2025 (Sol 1562) at the local mean solar time of 15:53:57.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Close-up
Hahaha Beat me to it, Paul Hammond. 😄
I am reminded of this Mars Guy episode from last year, but there are significant differences here, even before you consider the difference in the two settings (river valley vs. crater rim). They're not going to abrade here - not this target specifically, anyway - but I see more than enough to investigate at this site for a few sols. And yet this friable, fractured material we're targeting is small enough to be hidden by the sandy ripples...
This mission. I have to pinch myself.
Fully agreed, heaven knows whats under those ripples to the west. Saying that we could drive a bit further west without having issues with those ripples. I wonder if they'll venture that way 😀
They've even taken a night-time shot of this stuff, which... yeah, I really wish we could sample here. But the LED-lit shot is seriously full of detail:
Points of interest:
Now in a place like this, you always have to consider an impact origin: we're on the edge of a fair-sized impact crater and we've found plenty of material that was heavily modified/created by one or more serious impacts, including three of the four samples we've actually managed to bag on the rim. Impact breccia is complex stuff, a salad of ejected material that gets fused together and then solidifies into a chaotic and beautiful mass.
In this case, however, I really have to wonder. If this is impact breccia - even a breccia altered by long-lasting groundwater - I haven't seen a texture like it. The light grey zones and tan zones have fairly round outlines, rather than angular ones, which you would expect from shards of broken and ejected material. The distribution of the different zones (tan and grey zones tend to be grouped in small areas) doesn't seem random.
All in all, for me this is one of the most fascinating images of the entire mission, and that's saying something.
Lovely detail, I see they also used the ACI. I'm assuming that they'll give it a touch of LIBS while they're here :)