USTRAX is the one

Here's an animated GIF showing how the view to the SW might've shifted around:
Click to view attachment
(click to animate)

-Mike

They have, I started working on MSL a few months ago to do traversability analysis of the proposed landing sites.

Paolo

Sure! I would be really interested in seeing the wear and tear at the bottom of that wheel. But if I go there, do you mind if I bring along a spare actuator as well?

Well, if "islands in the Mediterranean Sea" is the theme for this area and given the amount of time we'll probably be at this site, I think the chance of having a feature named after Malta is quite high regardless of influence/lobby.


Would you mind to carry something to clean the lenses and solar panels too?

And a feather duster

First row of "Crete" is nice...

That's a neat example of sorting (zoom from center of mhowards image):
Click to view attachment

I get it...more "islands." Go, Malta...go, Malta...


That's awesome, Mike! Really nice. The diagrams were good, but the animation sealed the deal. Thanks for posting that.

I don't know if you could do it in a file <1MB, but I'd really like to see that sequence playing in both directions...in other words, rocking back and forth.

Hum...Islands in the Mediterranean is the theme for what I see...
...I probably should restrain myself from writing this words and let things follow its course but...
Sicily, Corfu, Crete...seems like we're getting closer...
Isn't Ithaca one ISLAND in the MEDITERRANEAN?
Cool to enjoy this nice cruise...

EDITED: Looks like we've met those Laestrygonians after all...they're from Sicily...
All this names are part of the Odyssey alright...needless to say I'm enjoying that a LOT...
So, following this line of thought I believe there will be a happy maltese on the days to come...

or should I say a happy gozitan!!OGYGIA,CALYPSO ISLAND OR Modern GOZO,one island of 5 making up the maltese archipelago 60 miles south of Sicily known better internationally as MALTA...BUT MALTA should suffice!!

Thanks! Here's a back-and-forth sequence (with a longer pause at the initial stage and the final stage):
Click to view attachment
[EDIT: (Click to animate) ]

-Mike

Hmmm. I'm not seeing these animations. Only the 1) Initial appearance frame. Anybody else having trouble?

Can somebody tell me which instrument is placed on Santorini in this image? I'm ashamed that I can't recognize them on sight...
Click to view attachment

--Emily

So am I - for myself, I mean. Not an expert, but I'm pretty sure it's the Mossbauer Spectrometer. reference link

They are working fine for me....... v interesting stuff!

I confirm it is the MB. One way to determine if it is the MB: if you see it on the same target for many Sols it is the MB.

Paolo

They are animated GIFs. You need to click on the icon to open up a window where the real animated GIF is displayed.

Paolo

Hey, wait a minute. Isn't that the Columbia Hills on the right side of the horizon in this view:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...00P1211L0M1.JPG
Compare with this view:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...14P1210L0M1.JPG

By "sorting" were you referring to the larger loose particles that appear to be concentrated in the center of the crack or to the larger particles (spherules?) that appear to be concentrated along bedding planes in the image? BTW, nice use of cross-cutting relations to deduce the faulting sequence (#234).

-- HDP Don

I do click on the thumbnail, and a window does open, but it only shows the first image.

You might check your software settings. Some browsers have an option to enable/disable animations. Also, some firewalls have similar settings.

Good catch, fredk. I wonder who originally coined the word "purgatoid."

You know, with Phoenix dead, and the rovers on hiatus for weeks, wouldn't this be a wonderful time to give us something new to analyze and talk about? Like maybe the HiRISE pics that cover the rest of the trek to Endeavour?

I refuse to accept that Phoenix is actually dead. Like the Norwegian Blue parrot, she's just resting.

Not released yet sadly. But it would be a great time for it, I agree.

OK...SS tidbits for the current situation...:

Any idea about when will the HiRISE images covering the lacking distance between Victoria and Endeavour will be released?

I don't know... that's up to the HiRISE team, not me

I'm here with this knot on the throat...
and my curiosity levels are high...really high... :-)

What's the theme behind Sicily, Corfu and Crete so far?
You aren't going to tell that it's the Odyssey...aren't you? :-D

(damn...) No. The theme for naming of cobbles is simply islands. We're expecting to see an awful lot of cobbles between here and Endeavour, like islands in the sea, so that's our naming scheme. It can be islands from anywyere. The cobble that we're looking at now, and where we'll be for superior conjunction, is named Santorini.

So...Santorini is the place to be until Xmas, is that it? :-)

No... but we'll be there until the middle of December, when we come out of conjunction. Then we'll move on.

Seems like a really nice place to be all year...been there already...have you (have you guys?...)?

Actually, a substantial portion of my book was written on Santorini. I had all the notes, but I needed someplace quiet to sit and write it all down. Much of the book was written on a hillside terrace in Oia, overlooking the caldera.

And no, I didn't pick the name Santorini for that cobble... someone else on the team did. But it's a nice place, on both planets.

Are we going to see Oppy driving during Xmas and until the end of 2008? Will she spent her reveillon on the road or on some martian resort?

There will be some sols of immobility, because we want to give the team some time off for the holidays. But we will make as much drive progress over the holidays as we can, unless another good cobble pops up in front of us.

After your answer what I understood is...you'll be on permanent stand by for Xmas...is that it? No rest at all...

It'll be just like every past Christmas... we'll give the team a few days off for Christmas and for New Year, and other than that we'll be doing flight operations.

This is it for now.
Have a great weekend!

havent given up yet....go Malta!

I for one am also interested to see hirise images the rest of the route. What particularly interests me are the mesas surrounding Endeavour. The lower strata should be made up of 'steno' material. What comes on top of that? Maybe a little bit o' ejecta material perhaps?

If by 'mesas' you are referring to the hills forming the rim of Endeavour, they are much older than the Meridiani plains formation. Endeavour is an old crater, part of the cratered highlands terrain, and the Meridiani Planum unit is draped over it, partly filling it. One interesting science goal will be the contact between the plains unit and the old crater rim. Another will be to assess the extent of water modification in the cratered terrain unit.

Phil

I know someone on MER has it, but so far I could not get my hands (eyes) on (in spite of me asking several times for it). I'm impatient as well. =:-)

Paolo

SS showed crops of one on at the Endeavour end at DPS

I have that - can i post it here?

Phil

Master Stooke, we're Canadian, you know better than to ask that question.

MAY I post it here, is what you meant to say.

Of course, I've always felt it better to just do something and ask forgiveness, instead of ask permission and have it refused. So, in that regard, the correct phrasing would be...

I got it and here it is!

As another Canadian, I guess it's my duty to help out and point out that a couple of crops of the image in question were posted in this post.


I think it was Phil who said there's still lots to do with the Phoenix imagery we have, now that we're not getting any more new images. (Gee, this is really turning into Canuck corner here!) There's plenty of Oppy imagery to play around with and keep us busy over conjunction. Here's a start. We can see our old friend the Beacon in the rear view mirror. So you should be able to see our current location from the Beacon. And we took a nice juicy pancam panorama from just below the Beacon, sols 970 to 991. Getting the heading to our current location from Tesheiner's map, I've identified the large, wide stretch of pavement that we're currently parked in the middle of (no name yet?). Here it is, circled in a sol 989 image:
Click to view attachment
Maybe others out there could identify more features or even plot our route. Kinda like Alan's Spirit map from up on the hill. But maybe the Beacon views could use some vertical stretching...

Mössbauer spectrometer

- roman

Good catch, fredk! Here's the feature with a 5x vertical stretch.
Click to view attachment

Well Rui, as a person of influence (as opposed to me, who is often simply under the influence), have you made that call to Tucson yet?

Here's a cleaner version of the view from sol 989 using the calibrated raw data, again with 5x vertical stretch:
Click to view attachment

...one of my favorite outcrops so far came down today... I was hoping to see these rocks through a narrower angle, and in nice false color like this. Sweet. ... ascending escarpments...

I'm guessing that the dip is shifting across the drifts, towards the SW. Is that right?

Sol1714 rough navcam stitch.

Thank you very much. That's a tough call.

It's become a colour panorama - with I think 7x3 frames per part.

And it looks like it's mostly down already. I'm going to just wait for James' version.

Yup it's been on my todo list for a while now, however I won't be able to start work on this till next week.

Not quite as regular as 7x3 chunks, Doug. But should end up being another full 360 degree panorama I think.

Ooooh.... look at all the luvverly layered rocks...!

Click to view attachment

These rocks certainly do look fascinating. Would anyone hazard a guess as to how hard they might be? I'm no geologist (!!), but it looks like could it be very low on the Mohs scale. This particular 'undercut' caught my eye........

Click to view attachment

....and why is the erosion so markedly preferential so close to the ground on the rock on the left - something to do with characteristics of saltation in the Martian environment?

I mucked around with this crop of Stu's pic to try to bring out what is in the shadow of the 'undercut'.........

Click to view attachment

.....looks like there could be embedded blue berries in the process of being eroded out of the rock. But if that is the case how come none of them have fallen on the sand?

Also interesting to see the rippled sand between the rocks that's finer than the surrounding sand and almost blueberry free....... but I better stop, because the more I look at all of this, the more questions I think of - perhaps I've caught the bug!!

If any of you professional geologists feel like making some in depth comments on the whole rock field in Stu's pic, then I'm sure that the rest of us would really find it interesting.

I can't imagine it being significantly different in hardness to any of the other rocks we've seen at Eagle, Endurance or Victoria - and it was remarked just how soft those were given the easy-time that the RAT had chomping into them.

I took a stab at summarizing some stuff I'd read regarding Meridiani geology over here.


From those articles, a possible explanation might be:

Current sands are blasting the rocks down to pavement. In this case the grains are hop-hop-hopping (=saltating) very,very close to the surface of the sand layer. You'd expect undercutting when there is a decent vertical profile. ("Decent vertical profile" in this case probably is only a few inches!)

The tiny ripples in the gap between the two rock pavement pieces give a clue to the current local wind direction near the face of the rock. The winds and thus saltating sand particles are running parallel to the face of the rock.

There may be a subtle effect of hardness of the different layers, probably heavily accentuated by the saltating particles closer to the surface at the base of the tiny layer stack. (think Niagara waterfall - where the lower layers erode and undercut to form the waterfall)

The little blue flecks could be blueberries eroding out, or they could also be little pieces of dark basaltic sand that have temporarily stuck to the rock. The dark basaltic sand is likely the current mobile erosive agent.

Notice how there is a tiny shelf that is just being exposed right at the surface. This might be the interface between the soft layer, or it could be a new section that is just being exhumed (and soon to be eroded).

(And on a less technical note, the rock on the left looks like the nose of a dolphin. I now have the "Flipper" theme song running through my head...)

-Mike

More supposition:

From this article: Sullivan et al. LPSC 38 (2007) Abstract 2048. "Aeolian geomorphology with MER Opportunity at Meridiani Planum, Mars." (freely available here)

[from the LPSC abstract, regarding Victoria Crater interior layers..]
"Lower down, closer to where basalt sand seems to have bedn deposited and then removed (conceiveabley many times), rock surfaces are red, as well as more eroded, suggesting that weathering has been enhanced by burial beneath a thin, porous covering of basaltic sand, thin enough to allow thermal communication between the atmosphere and underlying rock."


Look close at the rock on the right in Stu's color image. A thin undercut zone goes across the layers of rock in the lower part of the image. This shows that the near-sand surface zone is the active area of erosion. (The enhanced edges near this area show that hardness of the individual layers plays a role also).

This section of rock close to the surface of the rock pavement is also redder/dustier. (It could be an effect of shading, but the zone seems to extend around the rock).

-Mike