@65dBnoise

Yes a good run, upslope across friendly terrain. I'm assuming that they could have gone a lot further, but stopped there to have a look around before continuing on their notional path towards the next major science waypoints that you pointed out earlier :)

@PaulHammond51
It's possible that these stops could be related to communications. The rover assumes a certain orientation at end of drive, which Bob Balaram had attributed in the past to the necessary geometry to achieve good communication with the Mars orbiters.

To my IANAG™ eyes there seems to be nothing worth of stopping there. But IANAG, so ̄\_(ツ)_/ ̄

@65dBnoise

It did appear to orient itself at the end of the drive, as you say for better comms so it can use specific antennas for uplink etc. But why stop after only 200 meters, when it did no serious work the day before the drive, so one would imagine the batteries were charged enough to go much further in that drive.

@65dBnoise

Good call, I'd not considered that :) , and we did get the first set of post drive images pretty quickly :)

Maybe they'll get a few geostationary satellites to service future Mars missions. But probably not funded by NASA under the current budget.

BTW, is 'geo' the correct term for such a satellite on Mars? 🤔

@PaulHammond51
Areostationary or areosychronous would be a proper term, Greek based too, like geo-stationary. Also areoforming instead of geoforming Mars, etc.

Maybe if SpaceX ever gets to the point of having real success with their Starship, e.g. get one off the ground into a controllable Mars trajectory, and into a usable Mars orbit, NASA will magically find the budget to put those areosybchronous satellites there, if complete enshitification of space doesn't occur first, which I doubt.

@65dBnoise

I've been watching from a distance the effects of the deep cuts affecting NASA in recent times. It's not been pretty, and it's looking like there is worse to come. Pretty sad situation.