A Martian Vista Clear as Day | NASA's Perseverance Rover
This is a natural color view of a location called “Falbreen" acquired on May 26, 2025 by NASA's Perseverance Rover.
Captured at a location called “Falbreen,” this enhanced-color mosaic features deceptively blue skies and the 43rd rock abrasion (the white patch at center-left) of the NASA Perseverance rover’s mission at Mars. The 96 images stitched together to create this panoramic view were acquired on May 26, 2025.
The imaging team of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took advantage of clear skies on the Red Planet to capture one of the sharpest panoramas of its mission so far. Visible in the mosaic, stitched together from 96 images taken at a location the science team calls “Falbreen,” is a rock that appears to lie on top of a sand ripple, a boundary line between two geologic units, and hills as distant as 40 miles (65 kilometers) away. The enhanced-color version shows the Martian sky to be remarkably clear and deceptively blue, while in the natural-color version, it is reddish.
The rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument captured the images on May 26, 2025, the 1,516th Martian day, or sol, of Perseverance’s mission that began in February 2021 on the floor of Jezero Crater. Perseverance reached the top of the crater rim late last year.
“The relatively dust-free skies provide a clear view of the surrounding terrain,” said Jim Bell, Mastcam-Z’s principal investigator at Arizona State University in Tempe. “And in this particular mosaic, we have enhanced the color contrast, which accentuates the differences in the terrain and sky.”
Buoyant Boulder
One detail that caught the science team’s attention is a large rock that appears to sit atop a dark, crescent-shaped sand ripple to the right of the mosaic’s center, about 14 feet (4.4 meters) from the rover. Geologists call this type of rock a “float rock” because it was more than likely formed someplace else and transported to its current location. Whether this one arrived by a landslide, water, or wind is unknown, but the science team suspects it got here before the sand ripple formed.
The bright white circle just left of center and near the bottom of the image is an abrasion patch. This is the 43rd rock Perseverance has abraded since it landed on Mars. Two inches (5 centimeters) wide, the shallow patch is made with the rover’s drill and enables the science team to see what’s beneath the weathered, dusty surface of a rock before deciding to drill a core sample that would be stored in one of the mission’s titanium sample tubes.
The rover made this abrasion on May 22, 2025, and performed proximity science (a detailed analysis of Martian rocks and soil) with its arm-mounted instruments two days later. The science team wanted to learn about Falbreen because it is situated within what may be some of the oldest terrain Perseverance has ever explored—perhaps even older than Jezero Crater.
Tracks from the rover’s journey to the location can be seen toward the mosaic’s right edge. About 300 feet (90 meters) away, they veer to the left, disappearing from sight at a previous geologic stop the science team calls “Kenmore.”
A little more than halfway up the mosaic, sweeping from one edge to the other, is the transition from lighter-toned to darker-toned rocks. This is the boundary line, or contact, between two geologic units. The flat, lighter-colored rocks nearer to the rover are rich in the mineral olivine, while the darker rocks farther away are believed to be much older clay-bearing rocks.
Celebrating 4+ Years on Mars
Mission Name: Mars 2020
Rover Name: Perseverance
Main Job: Seek signs of ancient life and collect samples of rock and regolith (broken rock and soil) for return to Earth.
Launch: July 30, 2020
Landing: Feb. 18, 2021, Jezero Crater, Mars
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
Image Date: May 26, 2025
Release Date: Aug. 6, 2025
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