As we are about to end our study of The Cobble Santorini and getting ready to hit the road again.
I think it's time we start a new topic on the drive to come.
What challenges do we face and can we keep to solid pavement as much as possible



and a Merry Christmas to our little buddies on The Planet Mars.

01747 p2286.06 27 0 27 0 1 55 pancam_albedo_pan_L1

Might well mean a coord campaign with MRO/MODY

Doug

Pretty dazzling surface on Santorini (?): New MI
Glassy melt? Metallic luster?

Anaglyph of Santorini MIs...

Click to view attachment

Wow! That just looks heavy and dense.

Shaka commented in the last post on the "Conjunction" thread on the shininess. Is this perhaps due solely to windblasting by that ubiquitous talcum-powder dust?

The wire-brushed shiny surface of Santorini sure looks amorphous. Maybe some of the long-sought shock melt?

I wonder what the spectrometer results will show... (I hope they got good readings...)

-- MarkG

Bit rough and ready but interesting anyway...

Click to view attachment

"Shiny!" as Mal and his crew would say...

And the first post-conjunction drive, although I don't think Eduardo will be updating the route map for this one.

Not really.
The shortest drive in a long time: 0.8m.

<back to the kitchen and "helping" with the dinner>

Next excellent Horton's work:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hortonheardawho/3132953871/
and
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hortonheardawho/3132886769/
(By setting the cursor on right image, you can choose detailed images)

The basalts seen by Spirit early in the mission looked like Santorini as well - this might be basaltic ejecta from a distant crater.

Phil

Er, thanks Peter59 for linking to my Santorini MI images.

Unfortunately, one of my image note links was wrong and led to a focus zoom animation rather than to the MI pan. I have corrected the link and you may follow it to this pan:



I wondered why there were 136 "looks" for one pan and only 20 for the other - but 66 for the MI focus zoom...

A 15 image MI sequence has been uploaded for sol 1751 ( tomorrow sol ( for target Andros(?))) in the target area Crete

I can't decide whether Santorini has actually been brushed or not. The putative circular edge of the brushed area is also the fractured edge of the reflective face of the rock (according to Stu's anaglyph). Can anyone find a command to Oppy which corresponds to brushing Santorini?
Phil, did we see this degree of reflectivity in the earlier basalts?

I can't find any front hazcam images of the RAT positioned on Santorini.

However, there does appear to be a difference in the brightness of the top between 1713 and 1747.



Perhaps the difference is due to the sun reflecting off the MI instrument box onto the top of the cobble.

Here is a colorized version of the MI pan:



Hmmm...

And all the pressing of instruments up against it caused it to move a bit.

(Just noticed that the time stamp is an hour off--anyone else notice time problems?)

Is there daylight savings time on Mars?

I had not noticed the cobble had been moved. One of the placements must have pressed too much on the cobble. BTW, the cobble was NOT RAT-brushed. MB (1 placement), MI, APXS (2 placements) only.

Paolo

...assuming a Spock-like persona, I'll describe that as "interesting."

sol-light? I hate when those autumn days suddenly end an hour earlier.

Thanks for the info. I have removed the reference to the brush from the Santorini images.

Hmmm. The bright surface does look mostly clean - I would be nonplussed if told it was covered with dust like the adjacent front surface. So what goes on here?
I don't suppose the rock could have been so disturbed that it turned over, revealing its underside?? That could be dust-free.
If not flipped over, could rocks in this area be generally cleaned of dust on one side by peculiar local winds?
Curiouser and curiouser.

Yeah. I'm guessing that since most of the soft bedrock in this area that is standing above the basal elevation appears to be eroding, any cobbles are also being sandblasted regularly.

Adding a bit of colour...

Click to view attachment

Working on some new image processing tricks. Here are some Navcam red-blue anaglyph views from the current location...

Is there any word on when we'll get moving?

Nothing from the pancam web. I wouldn't expect anything until after the holidays.

We first need to complete the IDD campaign in this area. Possibly we might be moving as early as Wednesday, more likely middle or end of next week.

Paolo

Thanks for the info, Paolo !

... looking forward to the continuation of the Trip

P.S.: does someone have a link/formula where one could look up the current status wrt. "restricted/non-restricted" sols for the rover ?

I would hate to get anyone's hopes up, but the latest pancam downloads look suspiciously like drive direction shots.

http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportu...BBP2390L2M1.JPG

And suspiciously named 'pancam_drive_dir_4x1_L2R2' as well.

Of course just because drive direction images have been taken is no guarantee that we are leaving soon. The view is unlikely to change much however long we stay.

On 1759 we sequenced the ffirst RAT Brush since using the IDD as a 4 DOF arm. There were some questions about the activity and in case we had decided not to go ahead with the brush we would have been ready to drive off instead. Since we did not have drive direction PANCAMs and the NAVCAMS were from the previous location (I know, just less than a meter away) I had requested a set to be ready to drive.

I don't know when we will be ready to drive, but I would be surprised to see us drive off in less than a week.

Paolo

Santorini confirmed as a meteorite:

http://www.planetary.org/news/2008/1231_Ma..._Update_As.html

nprev,
I couldn't get the link to work, but here's an excerpt from the post:

"As Opportunity returned to its normal schedule following solar conjunction, it continued its close-up investigation of Santorini taking measurements with its alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer (APXS) and some close-up pictures with its Micrcoscopic Imager (MI). The cobble, Squyres announced this week, turns out to be another meteorite, a type of stony iron meteorite called a mesosiderite, basically “a dead ringer” for Santa Catarina and Barberton. “You don’t see this type of meteorite very often on Earth, but of the four meteorites we’ve found at Meridiani Planum, three are like this,” Squyres pointed out. “They are so similar to one another that we suspect they may be pieces of the same thing.”

Oh, my apologies; I screwed up that link copy! This one works.

Here's James's recent pan in a polar format with a more map-like geometry than the one posted in the original thread (now closed). North is at the top.

Phil

Click to view attachment

... and another one more stretched out...

Phil

Click to view attachment

Thanks. I liked that one very much.

Here's another view derived from James's panorama. This is Victoria, seen with a very large vertical stretch. Old-timers will recall the big debate on UMSF during the approach to Victoria - was the "beacon" (a rock on the top of Cape St. Mary) on the near side or the far side? Parallax soon showed it had to be the near side. But from this perspective we see why it had to be like that. Victoria formed on a slope, so its rim slopes. The near side is significantly higher than the far side.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Great job Phil!
Cape St Mary was clearly visible without stretching but in this view there is enough S/N to distinguish the whole crater from the much further distant terrain.

Some new microscopic images from Oppy:

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...ger/2009-01-01/

Darn, Zvezdichko, it's good to see those blueberries again! And maybe not so bad from a scientific standpoint, either -- while it's good, on the one hand, to be able to observe a variety of phenomenon, it's also good -- especially on a world we are exploring for the first time! -- to be able to establish a baseline and have some familiar "landmarks" -- almost like the trail of crumbs that Hansel and Gretel followed!

The blueberries here are a tad puzzling.

From the past discussions, I'd gotten the notion that rock ablation leaves blueberries as residue, then a layer of blueberries armors up the surface and prevents further erosion. So, I woulda thunk that blueberries WOULD NOT be found in areas with big drifts.

(Unless maybe the big drifts are frozen and the blueberry armoring has now halted erosion, even if there were stronger winds.)

Call me clueless....

There might be a few blueberries here, maybe from Victoria ejecta, but many of these chunks are not blueberries. There's quite a range of sizes and shapes.

Phil

Also, these MIs look suspiciously like the MIs I recall from the dark soils north of Victoria (in the deposition vs. sweeping investigations). Are we certain these are MIs from recent sols? And not just old images being flushed from the flash?

-the other Doug

The time stamps are from a few sols ago.
I would be surprised if they were not predominantly blueberries, but they are eroded ones. Blueberries do erode in time. These have been exposed for a longer period than those 'fresh' ones in the lag around Victoria.

You know, other Doug, the very same thought occurred to me -- the images of the blueberries looked so familiar that I thought they might be stowaways. We spent so much time staring at those early images, marveling at our ability to see grains of Martian sand a few hours after they were photographed!

Next to the target named Candia there was a patch of soil that we also MI'd. Lots of juicy blueberries.

Paolo

I can't tell from the images I've seen, but I'd bet that you don't see a whole lot in the way of ripples forming directly onto blueberry-armored soils. Perhaps we're seeing an ejecta distribution of blueberry-rich boulders and rocks which left behind an armoring that results in the bare, non-rippled patches? I've always thought I could see a certain degree of organization to the bare patches out in the ripple fields that look for all the world like splash patterns...

-the other Doug

If you can document those "splash patterns", oDoug, you've got a paper to publish.
I do feel, however, that our PIs will put other, regional patterns at a higher priority for understanding the history of Meridiani. Impact ejecta patterns will probably be viewed as 'noise' obscuring the 'important stuff'. YMMV