What's that in your "Swear Jar", Lyford? Blueberries?

sorry I'm not realy up to date...what are we waiting for here tonight?

Two thoughts: 1. Do we have uplift or was there a hill here before the Victoria impact?
2. If there is uplift only here could it be evidence of an oblique impact? I've been wondering why the dunefield, presumably in the topographic low, is displaced northwards from the crater centre, towards the highest part of the rim.

Brilliant again Stu, and diane and everyone. Another grand night out on Mars.

Just a thought - perhaps we should hold a press conference express express . . .

I agree that there may have been a hill before Victoria; the Beacon appears to be cut from a hill if you look at what's behind Beacon up on the annulus.

However, there's still a reason for the uplift, and the uplift doesn't appear to have been even because of the angle of the layers in Beacon's face. So we still have a question, even though Victoria's impact may have destroyed the answer.

As an adherent to the "Ancient Victoria" school of thought, I wouldn't hold to the "hill" thought. This area, to my eye, is the quintessence of "flat". The only hills I could imagine on this plain would be parts of the rims of craters younger than Vicky. The oblique impact idea did cross my mind however. Some tough, bulky remnant of the original rim could be holding up "Cabo Beacono" - that is, retarding or reversing its collapse.
I think I wanna closer look at it - #$@& clink - hurry up pancams !

Very good colorization again, Stu !

After looking at these pictures and the torrent of MRO photos (hey, there's a good idea for the future MRO firehose...a BitTorrent!) all I can say is.....

"You're going to need a bigger jar"

My apologies to Martin Brody...

I already gave up...I'm setting up a direct deposit from my paycheck to the jar...

Well, it's not like I was the cleanest-mouthed guy in the Solar System in the first place...

Hey fellas. We should make a swear-fund. With interest it could finance the next Mars mission...

Not a bad idea!

Speaking of next missions...imagine MRO's replacement. Will we have multispectral 1 cm resolution of the entire planet?

Hi,

Here is the Sol 959 Navcam view (always build with MMB ... ) :
Click to view attachment

Nice job, Ant. Those dunes in the bottom fascinate me. I imagine them as water waves that were frozen in an instant. I picture a series of water waves bouncing off the sides of a pool and then suddenly solidified.

I hope we get to see the south face of The Beacon in better light.

For some sunlight on the south face of The Beacon in the near future it's the wrong season (I guess). But they could take a picture with more exposure, couldn't they?

Of course you're right about the seasonal problem (Doh! gray hits forhead with heel of hand). It just seemed to me that in adjusting the brightness on these images of the Beacon, a lot of the contrast was lost. Cross-beds often show up as some subtle variations in contrast when low angle light is striking the outcrop.

>sunlight on the south face of The Beacon in the near future it's the wrong season...

It is. But OTOH good photographic technique will mean that the outcrops should be photographed under different lighting conditions to optimize the views. Low angle lighting for fine textural details, moderate angle lighting for overall details and soft, indirect lighting for albedo or color details. Oppy needs to take several images of each area to help chase away photogeists...

--Bill

Gray, I'll agree that adjusting the photo after exposure is less than ideal, but the real information loss is in the original exposure. It would be nice if Oppy could do what's called "spot metering" to expose for a specific area of its image. Either that or deliberate overexposure to get more shadow detail is what's needed. I don't know that Oppy is capable of either.

There are better alternatives than adjusting brightness or contrast, though. The better tools in Photoshop are "levels" and "curves" adjustments. They're available under the Image menu as adjustments, but the better alternative is learning to create adjustment layers (in the layers palette) so that the adjustments don't alter the image, and you can go back and change the adjustments (or hide them or delete them).

It seems that Opportunity is close enough to the beacon to take pancams where the whole field of view is the cliff. There should be no "spot metering" needed in that case.

Thanks Diane. I have only dabbled in image analysis. I'm certainly not at the level of most of the folks on this forum.

The view of Victoria on Sol 959.

Taken with the L0 navcam.

jvandriel

WOW!!!what an amazing day this is!!!

Is there anywhere ".jpg" version of that Cape Verde & Cape Frio images with little rover standing on them?
They are shown on latest update but I cannot find that images anywhere...

Thank you NASA/JPL/MER Team/UMSF...everybody!!!!

Seeing these pictures just makes me feel like a little kid again; I want to go running or tumbling down into the crater, kick up the sand, race across to the other side and climb up the rocks, then go digging around and pretend that I'm on Mars -- oh, wait, this is Mars! It's a grand feeling, and the only drawback is not actually being there, but as I share this problem with everybody else on Earth I may -- in time -- learn to live with it.

Did anyone else notice the tracks left by a few boulders as they rolled down into Victoria ? Must have been "recent" events.

B)-->