you want a pet rock?

You know me so well ;)

Very gracious. Many thanks :)

is it made of clay, and can you chew it?

Not clay, it’s an iron-nickel meteorite, that stuff is harder than nails, so chewing it would likely require some special teeth :)

Then I best stick with my first pick from 2016 :)

Probably way beyond my budget LOL

You did a fine job polishing it :) I guess I’ll have to find another one :)

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinmgill/54365739221

instead of a royalty free cinema-psychology-emotion-symphony track.

Here an good voice over with some cool observations etc… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMd2A1Wljfc

I hope that we’ll get all that raw data soon

Regular readers will remember the “white rocks”

Peer reviewed paper - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X2500055X

It would seem bigger, but this is imaged with a wide angle lens. The lander has a lot more cameras, I’m sure we’ll get some better shots of Earth and a nice panorama of the lander’s surroundings in the coming days It’s mission will only last 60 days, so they have a lot to do in a short time.

I really admired and miss that guy.

I can’t see it being funded adequately in the current climate, hope I’m wrong

Mars will always be tricky, even when your think they have all the bases covered, a new type of curve ball arrives, along with some extra bases. Looking back at the CacheCam images it appears as though they have had 2 or maybe even 3 attempts to seal tube 060, but one may just have been the process of cleaning the neck of the tube at the measuring station. If they don’t provide a separate mission update addressing this, then it’s a 6 month wait to read the mission managers reports in the PDS. Certainly one for the history books :)