I don’t think that battle will ever end. Such battles end up scrapping years of work. Budgets that change every 4 years on most missions are really wasteful, budgets that change more frequently are madness IMHO. We’ll see how it plays out this time.

Agreed! from the image sets it’s not a new core. I’ve been wearing readers for >40 years with increasing levels of power :) Even with the readers, my eyes are not what they used to be. I’m hoping they’ll acquire some 4-tile CacheCam images that I can stitch together and actually use to compare the two faces :) Looks like they have more than enough space in the tube to cap / seal the core. A few sols of post coring activities, including those close up images of the tailings, and they should be ready to move on. :)

I tried to post one of those new images a short time ago, but could not load images to Lemmy… I’ll try again after this reply

At this time I can’t tell in the relatively low resolution image if it’s the same face we imaged before with the CacheCam last time

If it’s a different face we may have lost some of the core when it was returned to the cache.

Agreed re crawl. Some of that could have been the same DSN issues where commands for MSL were not uplinked due to tech issues at the DSN, some could have been missed for M2020.

NASA has recently suffered a bunch of staffing, with another 25% cut in the 2026 budget, with MSR effectively canceled, not the sort of thing that generates motivation if you ask me. :(

Map link

https://mars.nasa.gov/maps/location/?mission=Curiosity

Pew pew pew! 😃

I’ve seen posts that used the MOLA data with the orbital images of Mars to make 3D images of the terrain… Amazing stuff :)

I think the team will be taking a closer look at these in the next day or so

There is a whole world out there to investigate beyond Gale Crater

Fully agreed, with the expected life of a the rover’s MMRTG, one mission was never going to be enough to investigate inside the crater, let alone the terrain outside the crater.