New Year, New Images from Mars!

The Mars 2020 science and operations team, as well as Perseverance itself, took some well-earned downtime over the December holiday period, but operations resumed in early January. The Margin Unit has proved tricky terrain for driving, so drive progress has been slow going, but Perseverance continues to (you guessed it!) persevere. We conducted proximity science on a dust-cleared natural surface bedrock target named Minga using PIXL, SHERLOC and WATSON (Minga is seen in the above Mastcam-Z image). Unfortunately, a SHERLOC issue during these proximity science activities left the arm unstowed and prevented us from driving away. The team has since stowed the arm, Mars 2020 engineers have been working to diagnose the issue, and the rover has resumed driving.