Bomb like material need not be dangerous. For example there are explosive bolts used in the mission already, and these bombs could be the same material as the explosive bolts used.

Bomb is probably a scary word to be using, I'm thinking of blowing a hole in the ground only a few inches deep. Say for example you have an extra kilo of weight, consisting of 50 ten gram bombs, 20 twenty gram bombs, and 2 fifty gram bombs. Now these can be of very safe explosive, some you can cut and drill and it is completely safe. Thermite or an equivalent might be used as well if it's safe enough.

So for a kilo of weight you can make 72 holes in things. For example you could have the equivalent of looking under 72 rocks. You see an interesting rock and you can blow a piece of it and look inside. With a crater full of dust you can blow the dust out of it and see the bottom. In some situations you could blow up an obstruction to the rover preventing it from getting to an interesting site.

This is a lot easier than high technology solutions like grinding off surface layers. There must be a safe explosive for this otherwise they couldn't be using explosive bolts already.

It could also work as a way for finding Carbon compounds. An explosion would tend to partially burn some hydrocarbons for example so any changes could be measured.