How do you choose a rock on Mars? Sometimes you don't—it chooses you.

For the past four months, Perseverance has had an unexpected traveling companion. Back on sol 341—that's over 100 sols ago, in early February—a rock found its way into the rover's front left wheel, and since hitching a ride, it's been transported more than 5.3 miles (8.5 km). This rock isn't doing any damage to the wheel, but throughout its (no doubt bumpy!) journey, it has clung on and made periodic appearances in our left Hazcam images.

This is not the first time a rock has hitched a ride on a Mars rover mission.

NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity has suffered a sensor failure, according to Håvard Grip, the chief helicopter pilot on the project. In a recent blog post on the NASA Science page, he described some of the challenges the tiny robot is experiencing in the harsh environment and also noted that a sensor failure is going to require a computer patch.

NASA will launch a research rocket from remote northern Australia this month in the agency's first blast off from a commercial space port outside the United States.

Three suborbital sounding rockets will be launched from the Arnhem Space Center on Indigenous-owned land near the mining town of Nhulunbuy in the Northern Territory on June 26, July 4 and 12, said NASA and the launch pad's owner, Equatorial Launch Australia.

The main body of NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft has been delivered to the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Over the next two years there, engineers and technicians will finish assembling the craft by hand before testing it to make sure it can withstand the journey to Jupiter's icy moon Europa.

The spacecraft body is the mission's workhorse.

NASA has sent the Artemis I rocket back to the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center for testing later this month, looking to get back on track for a potential moon launch as early as August.

The 5.75 million-pound, 322-foot-tall combination of the Space Launch System, Orion capsule and mobile launcher left the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center early Monday to make the 4.4-mile slow crawl to Launch Pad 39-B.

The rocket still needs to run through a complete wet dress rehearsal during which NASA will fill and drain the core and upper stage with 730,000 gallons of super-cooled liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen while also simulating a countdown but without lighting the engines.

It first rolled out to the launch pad back in March, but several issues scrubbed three test run attempts forcing the rocket back to the VAB, but now mission managers hope their headaches are behind them.

"I think we've got a pretty good plan in place. We'll see how it turns out as we get into our next attempt, but I certainly think we've learned a lot and figured out a lot of specific things and how you want to do this dance," said Tom Whitmeyer, NASA's deputy associate administrator for common exploration systems development.