39. The deck

This selfie taken by one of Perseverance’s navcams gives us a bird’s eye view of the rover’s deck. Well, sort of – there are definitely no birds on Mars! And one of the sophisticated instruments on show here is the planetary instrument for X-ray lithochemistry, or PIXL for short. It’s the boxy white object at the top of this pic, and it uses imaging to remotely analyze the chemistry of rocks. That way, we can hopefully find evidence of ancient biological life.