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…

There are several grave environmental and civil problems with Starlink and other proposed massive constellations:

• The threat to the ozone layer (when these low-orbiting sats start re-entering en masse in the next few years, we’re going to have more aluminum in the upper atmosphere than ever before - a known problem)
• Overcrowding of LEO - the choicest orbital space over this planet is finite. Satellites in low orbit have tremendous kinetic energy and do not (cannot) fly in formation, as they spread out vertically; not that Starlink is designed to. Kessler Syndrome catastrophe or not, the risk of collisions is increasing rapidly. As some researchers have put it, LEO is the “Wild West” right now, and it definitely needs to be regulated by international treaty.
• Light and radio pollution - aside from exacerbating the accelerating ecological damage from light pollution, this extends even to orbiting assets like the Hubble Telescope, which is already seeing interference from Starlink sats. I don’t see why SpaceX or any corporation, let alone nation, deserves to monopolize any part of the global environment this way. Astronomy and upper atmosphere research don’t need to justify their existence, particularly not in this situation… and yes, stargazers on this planet deserve the right to a “clean” night sky.
• Corporate squatting - Starlink is approaching the point of outnumbering all other extant satellites from all other nations, since the start of the space age, combined. Why do they get to crowd everyone else out?
• Vulnerability to the space environment - when the Sun acts up, Starlink sats have been disabled before, and in numbers. This is a threat to satellites in general (obviously), many of which are not shielded properly, but launching bunches of these satellites at once increases the threat sharply. I’m sure you’d agree that orbital debris is not something we should take lightly.

I could go on, but I trust you get the point. I don’t object to temporary small-scale deployments of satellite groups during catastrophes, but we simply don’t need the permanent deployment of tens of thousands of satellites that the US, Europe and China intend to launch for global internet coverage - that can be almost entirely achieved from the ground.

(Yes, I know, we’ve found other spherule-encrusted rocks before. We’ve even tried to sample them. That being said, there have been more and more weird rocks as we’ve climbed out of Jezero and into the great big world beyond it…)

Hello there, Mars360! I appreciate your uploading and linking these here.

Would it be difficult for you to add directional indicators to your panoramas (in the case of this one, the rover tracks and the tallest hill are aligned almost due east)? I’m going to link your video to the relevant page for the abrasion patch guide I’m working on, and I’ll be linking to your other videos if that’s alright. Thanks again!

Awesome mosaic, I love it when the rover gets up to this rougher steeper kind of ground.

BTW, the drive was to the east 😉

Despite their superficial similarity to Opportunity’s “blueberries”, the spherules at “Rowsell Hill” have a very different composition and likely origin. In Meridiani Planum, the spherules were composed of the mineral hematite and were interpreted to have formed in groundwater-saturated sediments in Mars’ distant past. By comparison, the spherules in “Rowsell Hill” have a basaltic composition and likely formed during a meteoroid impact or volcanic eruption. When a meteoroid crashes into the surface of Mars, it can melt rock and send molten droplets spraying into the air. Those droplets can then rapidly cool, solidifying into spherules that rain down on the surrounding area. Alternatively, the spherules may have formed from molten lava during a volcanic eruption.

Impacts and eruptions… both violent events. Neither exactly what Percy was sent to look for, you’d think - namely evidence of water action, and possibly traces of biology.

Except that there’s a very important difference between the two: impacts are common everywhere, from Mercury to Pluto, and provide no proof that a planet has a geologic “pulse”, that its insides are warm and active. Whereas volcanic eruptions prove exactly that. If we had these spherules in hand, we could determine their age and know that this part of Mars was still active at that date. Put that information about Mars’ internal heat together with the dates of the old lake sediment we sampled inside Jezero Crater, and you’ve got yourself a story.

You don’t get this sort of information by landing in the middle of the plains, as the Chinese sample return mission and the SpaceX proposal would have it. Just saying.

40 m elevation gain with the rover parked at a 15º pitch angle… judging by this rear hazcam image, there was some rougher driving there, at least toward the end. The rover’s current location seems like a fairly significant detour from the route identified a few months ago, and there’s a big patch of bedrock about 20 m uphill along its current heading.

I wonder if they’ve identified something interesting further upslope. This ground we’re on is kind of rubbly, and I don’t think we needed to come up this high if we were simply skirting that sand trap in the flats to the south. Perhaps that bedrock further up exposes material from a stratum we didn’t sample back on Witch Hazel Hill? I have no objection to taking a look, but maybe you should pay me no mind… I’m the last person Ken Farley listens to when it comes to driving this rover 😞