Wheel tracks and what appears to be distant clouds seen in this composite image taken by Perseverance rover. The base images were acquired after a drive to the southeast of close to 202 meters during sol 1595 (August 15.2025). The image was assembled / cropped from 6 post-drive NavCam tiles. Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
This really is a striking and beautiful image. Those mid-afternoon clouds should continue to be a feature for a while, at least 'til mid-summer proper, a few weeks from now. I wonder if they persist until sunset. I’m all for a geology focus on this mission, but I admit it would be nice to take movies of the horizon in this tropical cloudy season. We’d catch a lot of dust devils, too, like the one in the upper left!
I’m also not sure I remember seeing such a sharp transition from bright to dark tracks like trailing off into the distance like this before. A lot to contemplate here…
like the one in the upper left!
I totally missed that dust devil… (Old eyes were concentrating on the tracks)
One of the guys I followed on Mastodon left after the federated server when it closed down as he mistakenly believed that Mastodon was closing down, when all he had to do was to move to another server. His processing abilities were top notch in general, but especially for those feint dust devils. Both rovers do regular time lapse surveys for dust devil, most are very feint and take an extraordinary amount of processing. He’s now posting on BlueSky, I will try and go there more often and check out what he’s up to. Those post sunset high elevation clouds make lovely images.
I assume there is a ton of information in the appearance of wheel tracks that can be translated into rogolith behavior. When I first saw the previews of that NavCam on AeroBrowser I mistakenly assumed the transition was at a tile boundary, but it’s nowhere near, so it’s real :)
I use AeroBrowser to download the image sets after each drive as it downloads them is zip file sets with all all the tiles (left and right) along with a json text file each image. Having the zip files makes for simple assembly of the post-drive images.
Talking of images, I always assemble the raw L-NavCam tiles (after each drive). I assemble them as JPEG’s, so they are quicker to upload and meet upload limits. I don’t retain them after I have posted them to social media, as that would need a lot of storage that I don’t have. If you want I could send you the assembled raw L-NavCams as soon as I assemble them. That would save you a little time after each drive. DM sending images via Lemmy has some issues, but I should be able to use Discord or maybe by email. Let me know if you want me to start sending :)
