[prismic]

They mentioned during the media briefing that the terrain they were flying in were featureless, which is extremely challenging for it to determine where it's at, and thus it's possible that it misidentified some aspect of the terrain and caused this. Unfortunately because communication was lost when it landed, the flight data was lost, so we will never know for sure what happened.

[Dylan16807]

It doesn't save flight data until it receives confirmation of download?

[foobarbecue]

During flight, high-rate flight data is written to volatile RAM, and 1HZ data is telemetered to Perseverance. The high-rate data is not written to disk until landing, because writing to disk is slow and CPU-intensive. There was a brownout during or just before landing, and sadly that meant the high-rate telemetry data was lost because it was never written to disk.

And by "disk" I mean non-volatile flash memory.

[Dylan16807]

Okay, so we do have a subset of the flight data.

Thanks for the info.

[foobarbecue]

Yes, and the team is vigorously studying the 1HZ data leading up to the brownout.