NASA’s Mars 2020 mission team has been working methodically and thoroughly, making good progress on understanding the best path forward to remove the uninvited pebbles from Perseverance’s bit carousel.

Simply put, we are returning the remaining contents of Sample Tube 261 (our latest cored-rock sample) back to its planet of origin.

I imagine your next question is, “Why are you dumping out the contents of the sample tube?” The answer is that, at present, we are not certain how much cored rock continues to reside in Tube 261.

So if our plans go well with our pebble mitigation (see below), we may very well attempt to core “Issole” (the rock from which this sample was taken) again.

Which brings me to next steps in our pebble mitigation strategy: we’re sending up commands to the rover later today, ordering it to do two rotation tests of the bit carousel.