Perseverance carries a “gaseous dust removal tool” (gDRT) on its robotic arm, for clearing away any loose sand and dust covering a rock target that the science team wants to analyze. It does so in order to avoid contaminating the measurements with loose surface material - the science team is generally interested in the make-up of the rock target itself, not the thin veneer of wind-blown sand and dust you find nearly everywhere on Mars.
I’d estimate the boulder in the above animation to be about 40 cm wide (see here for a wider view). The first image (before the small patch of dust was removed) was taken on sol 1629, with the subsequent post-gDRT images from 1630.
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