I’m not sure. In the case of Perseverance, I know that they block out those goddamned instances when the sandworms photobomb the panoramas, but I don’t blame JPL for that - those things are repulsive.

We do know that Curiosity has some overly aggressive tendencies when it comes to small furry mammals. I hope the rover AI hasn’t gone on another rampage and tried to hide the evidence again. It takes months to remove the organic matter contamination from the instruments.

What’s with the censored areas? Not censored, it’s just data drop-out happens from time to time after all the craft is 174.8 million miles from Earth, and those images have been transmitted to a Mars orbiter, then to a ground station on Earth and then transmitted to JPL, sometimes data gets messed up on the way :)

JPL sometimes orders the rover to re-transmit important affected images, check the image server again in a day or two and you may see these have been replaced with images that have no drop-out.