It looks like ice.

A hole in Mars:
Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

Higher resolution version. Interesting pattern lower right on the rear wall of the first dig.
Click to view attachment

Do you mean the chain of 4-5 largish granules near the top of the right side of the rear wall of the dig (i.e., just below the 'crest' in the soil at the back of the scoopage) or something else/lower down/?

Greg : do you really think that we can have a "3d" impression with such big pictures. My eyes can't merge the two frame to have the relief impression.

It seams to me that the part further than the actual sample and before the distinctive mark of the arm colapsed a little bit I guess under the pressure of the arm. I have the feeling that the consitency of the soil is like talcum powder (Yeti) even if we can see these little clods.

Yes, even finer than talc probably. I believe that the dust on Mars is much finer than any that is stable in Earth's environment -- probably because of the moisture in our air. But still substantive enough that the Martian winds can clean the rover's solar panels of it, and can whip it up into storms that homogenize it, to some degree at least, planetwide.

But I'm an amateur. Anybody want to tell me if I got that right? Is Ann Clayborne in the house?

Well, speaking as an amateur myself, I've always wondered about the electrostatic properties of Martian dust. Are the clods sticking together because of this?

Here's my try at RAC color. Since they are starting each sequence with an unlit image followed by the R, G, and B lit images, I tried subtracting each lit image from the unlit image, isolating just the contribution of each light. The results are vaguely un-awful, even working from the raw jpegs (although I did blur them significantly to reduce the compression artifacts). I look forward to seeing what can be done with the calibrated data!



update: Changed the method a bit, and updated the image. Now I'm using the color information from the subtraction images and the luminance information from the "no light" image for a sharper look. Anything not lit by the LEDs comes out psychedelic

Also interestingly, it looks like to me from the 3D image in the undisturbed soil that there are possibly many tiny blackish 'weep holes' scattered about in the surface soil crust. Perhaps these possible weep holes are formed by outgassing of subliming water and CO2 ices?

Remember the depositional environment here. The fine dust is an aeolian deposit, and very fine material likely in the micron-range, with some volcanic ash. The coarser material are likely re-worked regolith and fractured rock from nearby impact ejecta (eg, Heimdal). Some rocks may be made of water ice with sediment and gases (possibly even in a clathrate). The ice we see is likely from repeated deposition of hoar-frost, which may end up being preserved when an insulating blanket of regolith/dust is emplaced. I'd suspect many discontinuous layers ranging from ice-rich/soil poor to ice-poor/soil-rich.

Has anyone worked out a particle-size distribution of the aeolian sediments of the dust based on Stokes Law?

A very alien environment.

--Bill

Great stuff. If I understand correctly the impact of a uniform bias (such as solar "white" illumination leaking into the scoop here) on the result of CIE XYZ calculations, they should in principle only desaturate the color of a sample illuminated with RGB diodes, but not completely in shadow. Of course, the luminance of each diode most likely complicates this a lot since for calibration you'd have to scale each filter by their relative brightnesses and then you end up messing with solar whitepoint bias as well. Long story short, we need to look at samples during nighttime

Here's my take on the color assuming the scoop interior is sufficiently in darkness and the scoop itself is more or less gray. 2 observations were done at two distances, I've merged two of the same. The upper shot seems to be in better focus.

Click to view attachment

It also show a ochre/gold color barely visible on the other picture.
I'm not a specialist (nevertheless I'm in the agriculture buisness) but it's the more Earthlike soil I've ever seen on Mars.
We've gona need a scoop or arm emoticon I guess

Be very wary when interpreting the color in these raw composites! This is just representative stuff. About the only safe conclusion we can make is that the soil color is different that the scoop color.

EDIT: Here's a different processing, this time also with subtracting the monochromatic signal and filtered to remove noise:
Click to view attachment

I'm inclined to think the above is a more accurate version than my first try. Definitely looks more Martian. The purple bit is due to low S/N of raw files.

I gather that in the images taken so far with the RBG LEDs, solar light is a complication. I wonder how taking such images at "night" would work.

Quite well I would expect, the images of the scoop taken during cruse when it was very dark inside were good.
However, calibration shouldn't be too difficult given the data the team has, I doubt we'll see them resort to night time shots.

Of course you'd have to wait a good while yet for any night to arrive!

OK, I maintain it's Earthlike...at least Roland Garros like

Official colour version of the first scoopful.

http://fawkes3.lpl.arizona.edu/images/gallery/lg_1698.jpg

Hey, if you kick the saturation up of my second try here by 40 Photoshop units, turns out it doesn't look that much different!

Great release. Looks like they glued in the overexposed edge of the scoop to the right, though.

I was wondering if that whitish stuff was a sun reflection, but it didn't move as I'd expect. Looks like it's definitely scraped off bits of something white.

and Roland Garros like color too

They just pointed out that if you look at the high-res image of the dig site, you can see a whitish area at exactly the same position as the whitish material in the scoop, so they're pretty confident they dug up something whitish, but they don't know whether they're looking at icy materials or salts.

Also they said today's telecon should be available online later today.

--Emily

I use a 3D image viewer (Stereo Photo Maker) to zoom in, out and wander around the landscape. Almost never look at the original.

Have a look here. The two images seen together in 3D seem to increase the resolution of either alone. There appears to be a radial darker pattern on the lighter rear dig wall emanating from a central point? Also a lighter / whiter core of the darker radial pattern? At least to my old eyes. Or is it just a clump of fallen dirt and some JPEG noise?
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The pattern on the rear right bottom dig wall is also visible in this colour image:
Click to view attachment

Eppur si muove..... ??

3 exposure stack to improve S/N ratio:
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To me that sure looks like the lander blasted the soil away and exposed the ice.

Judging from the colour images,martian soil looks like rust and the way it stains the sides of the scoop,it seems to be wet powdery rust!

Hello to everyone :-)


So I am wondering why the change between the two sol's?

Here is my version.

Different camera location, different camera orientation, different illumination.

Hey Big Joe (and welcome to all our other "newbie" members too, there sure are a lot of you suddenly!)...

Doug just beat me to it. I think the only diffences visible between those images are due to shifts in perspective / viewing angle, etc. There doesn't appear to be any change to the position of the leg footpad on the surface, no surface movement or change either.

Given the ambient temperature of between -83 and -28 deg C - 'wet' is somewhat unlikely. The arms actuators are heated, but the scoop itself is not, and whilst some thermal conductivity into the scoop is inevitable, I don't believe, at such cold temperatures, it would be enough to bring the ices over 0 deg C.

Try scooping dry flour or talc or other exceptionally fine grained material and it will also stick to surfaces in a similar way.

As for rust - well - there's a reason Mars is the colour it is - it's rammed full of Iron Oxides

The sublimation of pure water ice in the Martian north polar region at the sort of ambient temperatures that Phoenix is seeing would, if I'm remembering correctly, result in the loss of something of the order of 2-10microns from the surface per day. Even factoring in the additional IR heating from the the lander I can't see how that would result in any noticeable change over a couple of Sols. I don't have a reference for that number though and I can't even recall where I read it so I'd welcome any reference to something that either backed it up or proved it wrong.

well,i meant 'wet' ,not in the literal sense but thanks for the reply Doug

Thank you for the welcome just found the site when I went looking for any info on the Phoenix mission.

What I meant to ask is where I have the arrow pointing in this image with regards to the soil/"ice" edge is that a result of a different angle of camera?

Thanks!

I've experienced similar dust in rural Queensland, Australia. Australians call it "bulldust". Bulldust has a similar color to Martian regolith. Bulldust is finer than talcum powder and flows like water when hit with an automobile's tire. If one drives into a deep patch of bulldust, it's very difficult to get out (MER-B was once in an analogous situation). Typically one must tie a steel cable to a tree and then pull the car out with a winch.

I think so - just a perspective issue. If you rotated them 90 degrees, you could make an anaglyph from them.

Doug

The dust in Saudi Arabia might be similar in properties aside from color. It's just miserable; gets everywhere. It also seems to form duricrust rather readily given any sort of exposure to moisture, presumably because of its extremely fine consistency.

Come to that, a lot of the volcanic soils (mostly ash) in Alaska act the same way. During the spring, windstorms blow that crap off of the mountain slopes and you'll suddenly have this drifting grey material that, if moistened, turns into a pretty good imitation of concrete after it dries.

My thought exactly. Here's a cross-eyed version:
Click to view attachment
Big Joe, as far as the change you arrowed, I'm pretty sure it's due to the fact that the time of day, and sun angle, is a bit different in the two frames, so there's a bit more soil in direct sun in one frame than in the other.

Thank you for the response's. It's wonderful to have a forum to discuss the images as they come down.

I was wondering whether anyone expected the thrusters to expose the ice, here's the answer:
http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=6592

And very valuable to have new, active members. Welcome!

How can I determine which RAC led illuminated the scoop contents? There doesn't seem to be anything on the image site or in the file name which is a help?

It's in the file name just like the filters numbers for the SSI. At the end: M?M1 ?=R,G,B,D (Red, Green, Blue, Off)

See http://www.met.tamu.edu/mars/filenames.html

http://fawkes3.lpl.arizona.edu/images/gallery/lg_2753.jpg

Is what I get for file names from the Arizona Phoenix site. I take it there is another site with the full / real file names?

Colors in the showel. This need to put the saturation at high level to have the colors clearly visible.

You have four options:

Open that file with an EXIF reader to get the product ID.
Download with MMB which now renames the files.
Download from my site where I have renamed them (see my sig)
Download from the NASA site http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/images/index.html

James

Hi James,

It's digitally encoded in the JPEG data stream. I should have realised that. Thanks for the clarification.

Greg

New DirtShot (TM?) in approx. color:
Click to view attachment

This sample has been taken deaper than the 1 st one : http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images.php?...2746&cID=42
It look's like there are at least two "pieces" more consistant/ stone like (down and left in the scoop) including one "brighter" than the genral color of the sample. Your feeling ?

The sol 9 dig further exposed the 'bright spot'. Here's a comparison between the sol 7 trench and the sol 9 trench:


Full filter color of the sol 9 trench :


and the sol 9 scoop: