A few days ago began the operations to try to compact the soil around MOLE, in the hope that it will resume digging underground.
In this photo taken by the Instrument Deployment Camera (IDC) at 16:12:48 LMST, we can see the robotic arm of InSight while it is wandering around the vicinity of MOLE without performing any significant action, as shown by the total absence of tracks on the ground in addition to those already existing.
Maybe these maneuvers have only the purpose to calibrate the precision of the movements of the robotic arm itself; in fact it is almost a month that HP3 has been repositioned in order to better act on MOLE, but at the moment we only see this kind of maneuvers that apparently seem totally useless without a minimum description on the sense of such operations.
This photo has been processed to allow a better view of the colors, balancing the white and slightly increasing the microcontrast and color saturation.
Original image: https://mars.nasa.gov/insight-raw-images/surface/sol/0230/idc/D005R0230_616959273EDR_F0101_0095M_.PNG
This post has been automatically translated. See the original post here.