English: PIA24770: WATSON's View of Bellegarde

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover used its WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) camera to take eight images – combined here into the single composite image – of a rock abraded by a tool on the rover's robotic arm. The images were taken on Aug. 27, 2021 (the 185th Martian day, or sol, of the mission). Nicknamed "Bellegarde," the abraded target is 0.4 inches (5 centimeters) in diameter.

The supplemental image (Figure 1) shows details of the abrasion target with a blue box outlining the location of spectral scans performed by the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) instrument. This area was scanned by SHERLOC for specific minerals on Aug. 28, 2021 (the mission's 186th sol).

A subsystem of SHERLOC, WATSON can document the structure and texture within a drilled or abraded target, and its data can be used to derive depth measurements. The area within the blue box is roughly 6.5 millimeters squared.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory built and manages operations of Perseverance and Ingenuity for the agency. Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA. WATSON was built by Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) in San Diego and is operated jointly by MSSS and JPL.