A new post on the #Perseverance rover blog, "Ensuring Robotic Arm Safety During Abrasions", written by Thirupathi Srinivasan, Robotic Systems Engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, discusses the in-built safety provisions to ensure that the rover isn't itself damaged during drilling and abrading operations.
The theater of operations for #Flight52 of #Ingenuity : up over Mount Julian and down into Fall River Pass.
The animation shows a map with some plausible paths for #Perseverance (green dashed lines), line-of-sight between the rover and the landed heli (red), visibility from the estimated landing location, ground profile, my old landing prediction (green), and the new estimate (yellow). The line-of-sight is obstructed by Mount Julian by 6-7m
WATSON has been busy examining rocks and regolith in the rover's new workspace, but it took time out to take a photo of PIXL's calibration target.
This target includes disks to provide X-ray backscatter, and three other responses. The central cross, a chromium line and a nickel line, is for position characterization.
The pseudo-random distribution of black dots is for calibrating PIXL's micro-context camera's laser pattern generator, used for distance measurements.
Great memory @PaulHammond51 !
Then maybe, "the first time Phobos is viewed in broad daylight from a rover on Mars"? 😀 A few minutes before it took that image it had captured the sun:
#Perseverance has lost its pet rock, which first thumbed a ride way back on Sol 341 and had accompanied the rover for 427 sols.
Perhaps the rover's motion over the rougher terrain recently knocked it out of the left front wheel, or maybe it just hopped off to visit family members in the Belva area.
There was a second hitchhiking rock in the right front wheel, but that is no longer there, either.
The map shows the official flight path and an estimated location and field-of-view (cyan) of the RTE 51-7 image posted earlier.
EDIT: The flight path may be an indication of the path #Perseverance may follow when it departs Mount Julian, as the almost flat top of that hill appears to be smoother than other path choices.
Fresh down from Ingenuity's 51st flight, it photographed all of Belva Crater with the rover on the rim of it. Rover tracks are also visible. At the time the photo was taken, Perseverance was around 180 meters (590 feet) from Ingenuity. Some EDL landing debris is also visible on the bottom portion of the image. This is likely some MLI (Mylar) blanket insulation from the descent stage.
An instance of robotic life on Mars. #Perseverance (up left corner, animated zoom) and Belva Crater, seen by #Ingenuity during #Flight51. The tracks the rover made a few sols ago can be seen crossing from right to left near 1/3 from the top.
Here is #Ingenuity's #Flight51 stabilized with reference the landing spot. This version makes it easier to see how the heli chooses where is less hazardous to land and then diverts to that spot.
Visibility plot from estimated landing 51, together with ground profile along the line-of-sight.
Despite the ~220m distance, #Perseverance received the last image when #Ingenuity had landed; the new location of the #MarsHelicopter is more than 4m below the local horizon created by what I believe is Mount Julian, which is blocking the view
If I were a few years, err... decades, younger I'd be eager to do a PhD on UHF Land Mobile Radio propagation on #Mars 🤓 😍