For God’s sake, stop it with the conspiracy theories. Trace Gas Orbiter would absolutely not miss the, well, methane emission, from a single baby cow, let alone an adult specimen worthy of being prepared as wagyu. Everyone knows that a Japanese master chef would quit (or worse…) before disgracing himself thus. He would never abandon a thickly-marbled specimen on a great big windy crater rim like this.
This is Mars. If you want your vulgar gyudon, there’s plenty of that on the mad blue planet next door. Martian wagyu should be part of the finest sukiyaki, to be eaten in formal dress, in deeply contemplative silence.
… I should add - if you can get a sample of this rock for us, we’ll even let you eat part of it. It might be a bit salty, but you can be pretty sure Martian beef is nitrate-free…
I’m not often surprised anymore by whitish or light-toned materials near a rover since Spirit uncovered all that whitish silica with its dragging dead front wheel, all those years ago. It seems we often find that Mars is red only until you literally scratch the surface.
I have to say that Percy often drives right past plenty of rocks I’d like to investigate more. I know that Ken Farley et al. are doing just that with remote sensing (the results of which we aren’t privy to for quite a while), so they have some idea of what they’re looking at, but I’m often tantalized by a lot of this stuff.