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Marzipan wrote: Hi all, to me this looks like an airbag rupture. Perhaps it's where that 'bunny rabbit' came from? Anyhow, you could imagine after many bounces, the layers would be getting a little thin on the airbag protection front and one last stone punctured a cell, the escaping gas then blowing the 'dust' off the more static under-surface. ??
Based on Doug's image that shows both the rock and the bounce mark, it appears the lander was coming in from the upper right to lower left and was probably moving fairly slow by the time it got here...slow enough that it only rolled another 20 feet or so into the crater (still can't get over the fact the thing landed in the tiny crater on this flat plain).
From the angles it is possible but not probable that the 'flow' we see in the upper left of the image would have been caused by a ruptured airbag.
It makes me wonder, if they hadn't landed in Eagle crater, but instead just rolled to a stop out in the flat somewhere...would they have roved over to the larger crater early on and studied it after doing some brief soil science? Who knows? We could have been at the big crater already for weeks.
Eric P / MizarKey