The Perseverance science team finally published a new update last week describing the rover’s status, the first such update since December 2025, a hiatus of more than ten months.

This new update provided no explanation for the long gap, though it did give this summary of what the team and the rover have been doing during all of 2026:

After a long hiatus, the Perseverance rover updates page is back. A lot has happened on Mars in the meantime, and with regular updates now resuming, there is plenty to catch up on — Perseverance has been busy. The rover has spent 2026 exploring the “Lac de Charmes” area, an area of valleys and ridges west of the Jezero crater rim that represent a “wild west frontier” for the mission. The rocks in this area are among the oldest Perseverance has encountered. They formed when Mars was still a young planet bombarded by asteroid impacts, long before the sedimentary rocks inside Jezero crater formed in rivers and lakes. They therefore could teach us much about the earliest era of Martian history — and, more broadly, how rocky planets evolved during the tumultuous early history of our solar system.

The science team decided to thoroughly explore this ancient and intriguing terrain first, before deciding which rocks to sample.

Click for interactive map.

Earlier this month I had posted my own update on Perseverance, entitled “What is going on with Perseverance?”, noting the long gap in updates and stating the following:

While there have been no reported issues with the Mars rover Perseverance, and while it appears to be functioning normally as it moves around the hilly barren terrain west of Jezero Crater, there appears to be some sort of indecisiveness in how the science team has been operating the rover for more than a year, with an almost complete black-out of updates to explain what they are doing.

The map to the right provides a sense of this dithering. The last time the rover drilled a core sample was June 6, 2025 (sol 1551), more than fifteen months ago. Since then, the rover first traveled south along the outer rim of Jezero Crater to point A, then west to point B, then west again to point C, then south to point D, then south to point E, then north again to point D, then east passing point B to head north to its present position at point F.

I then added that the rover’s wandering back and forth over the same terrain suggested they were doing a wider survey before picking a drill spot. The team’s update last week confirms this guess, and might even have been prompted by my post.

If so, hallelujah! A pause in updates because they had nothing to report is far better than a pause caused by unstated technical problems.