Today's most fascinating rocks...

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In Stu's first image, there seems to be a second layer that is qualitatively different from the smooth crust layer. It is green in the false color while the crust is blue-grey. The second layer seems to be packed with berries. Any thoughts on this?

I'm not convinced that there are two different layers, of different colors - just areas of an excavated filled crack that do or don't contain blueberries. The berry-filled areas have different albedo properties that can mimic an actual color change, but there need not be any implied change in minerology.
This is another filled crack, exposed by the impact, such as we first examined a fortnight ago at Chocolate Hills. I have seen quite a number of fragments of such gray crack-fill on the Concepcion ejecta. It seems to be a characteristic of this crater, that we have not noticed before at other Meridiani craters, though we have looked at a large number of laminated sandstone ejecta blocks. Again I ask: why the difference?

Howzabout a WAG hypothesis that preexisting cracks in the bedrock filled up with sediment, but that only wider spaces between the blocks would admit blueberries. Then something happened to indurate/lithify the crack fill. This could have involved slow, cold, 'damp' chemistry or a quick, hot, impact related process that happened a fraction of a second before the blocks were ejected. Assuming that JPL did the spectrometry on the Chocolate Hills exposure, they may have clear evidence for one of these alternatives - or maybe not . I still can't understand why we see it here and not at Eagle or Endurance or Beagle or Victoria etc. Unless this kind of crack fill just doesn't last more than a thousand years (or 5 or 10 or so) after exposure.

Looking forward to JPL's report.

3D panorama of lots and lots of rocks...!

http://twitpic.com/14yqg5

Oh-oh. It looks like Oppy's made a serious navigational error on her latest drive, and ended up at the Viking 2 lander site:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...FNP1212R0M1.JPG

Wow... pick yer way through that lot, Oppy...!!

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Exactly what I thought when I saw this one, possibly the most classically 'Mars like' image Oppy has ever taken.

Also in the downlink today was the last bit of the initial Concepción Crater pan.



James

WOW! A marvelous product for a marvelous vista!
Thanks

Gorgeous pic James, one to drool over, definitely.

Oh yeah, definitely in the Top 10 list for panoramas... not that I'd ever try making such a list, of course!

Today's "Wow!" Award surely has to go to...

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You've been doing some beautiful work with these rocks, Stu.

Phil

Thanks Phil, appreciate that. A couple more in this new blog post...

http://roadtoendeavour.wordpress.com/2010/...ocks-everywhere

Amazing quality! You really take us there Stu... please keep 'em coming
Ta

Yes Stu! Trouble is we trend to take this as granted and as "normal" product from you.
Your hard work deserve an award instead

Some pics. from sol 2165 are down: http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...cam/2010-02-25/
We're still near the ejecta ray but moving away. I'm wondering if the intention is to "sniff" another target or just do a circumnavigation...

I hope we're moving on...

Can't see it; there are a lot more fascinating rocks here to see yet...

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Stu.. your pics. They bring out the sands of time writ on the layered rocks of Mars. All I can say is WOW!

As eager as I am to march on to Endeavour... a lot can be learned here.

Craig

Some really exciting data here for getting some correlations:
-The rate at which the surface is removed, and berries exposed for newly excavated blocks
-The rate at which craters fill
-The rate at which ejecta gets buried
-Time, hundreds of years, thousands, tens of thousands?
Which processes are better know as to time constrints:
-Surface removal of newly exposed blocks
-Filling of craters and burying of ejecta
Any experts here want to educate us on these issues

Stu, I love your pictures. Do you just colorize the raw grayscale images, or do you combine images taken through various filters to get the color? (Sorry if this is a stupid question, but I don't really have the time to tinker with the MER images, and I am continually amazed by what you guys manage to do with them. When the MER missions began, I tried combining red, green and blue MER images, and I got horrible results. I quit trying then.)

To be honest, I really do just "mess about" with the R, G & B raw images (or whatever's available) in Paintshop and then Photoshop Elements until I get something that seems to have the same colours as the images seen in Jim Bell's book and on the official rover websites. I know others here use all sorts of algorithms, hi-tech tweaks and the like - which is why people like James and Ant produce images so superior to mine! - but I just change levels and hues and saturations until I get something that looks suitably martian. (Sharpen up a bit... add some highlighting on a layer... throw a floodlight on it... yep, pretty...!) So, as I've said before, my images shouldn't be taken as "calibrated" or "true colour", they're essentially images of 'My Mars' to show in my Outreach talks. I'm just glad some people here like them too.

Some new Concepcion images here: http://roadtoendeavour.wordpress.com/2010/.../tootling-along

I'm a similar situation to charborob when it comes to creating RGB images from MER pancams.

Using Photoshop, my L4/L5/L6 composites typically end up with blue soil and require a lot of fiddling around with channel and colour mixers, levels, hue, saturation and contrast before I end up with something that looks (very) approximately Mars-ish. I often find the process unsatisfactory. All credit to Stu et al for their wonderful images.

And the nominations for today's Best Boulders go to...

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... and ...

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More pics here: http://roadtoendeavour.wordpress.com/2010/...ction-of-stones

First Post.

I find it interesting that these look like they were once one with the near end and far end pointing up at one time then the rock split causing the two halves to fall away from each other? After further staring, there are spots of the coating(?) on different planes of the first rock...indication that the coating may be crack fill and not ejecta splash?


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Roger that. I presumed it would end up like Stu's. That's what I get for thinkin!;)

I agree - there wouldn't be any impact melt from a small impact like this. It has to be crack fill material.

Fill.

But the crack fill would have to predate the impact given that this is thought to be a recent crater, yes? That seems like a discontinuity. We've seen no evidence of current volatiles @ Meridiani...which in itself doesn't mean they're not there, of course.

Not sure I get that, np old chap - the crack fill could be half a billion years old or more, maybe 3 billion. Suddenly it's excavated by this recent impact. A million years from now all these friable rocks will be broken into sand and dust. We normally see crack fill as a little protrusion along a crack, here we see it, rather ephemerally, on the sides of blocks.

Phil

Guess what I'm stumbling on is trying to understand how, structurally, an already-fractured rock could survive the Concepcion impact relatively unscathed. The tensile/bonding strength of the fill material is an unknown, though, so probably I'm reading too much into this.

I've written a new "astropoem", inspired by Concepcion, and I hope some of you will take a moment to go read it over on my "Road to Endeavour" blog.

http://roadtoendeavour.wordpress.com/2010/...artian-geology/

HUGE thanks to Ant103 for giving me permission to use one of his beautiful wallpapers as the background image!

Excellent, Stu! One of your best. Do these come easy to you or do suffer about them for untold hours and days before presenting them to the world? And I couldn't agree more about the background image. In fact, it's been my desktop image ever since it appeared in this thread several weeks ago.

nprev, my amateur "arm-wavey" explanation would be remind you that not all rocks broken and ejected by the impact experienced the same level of energy. The rock in the middle vaporized; the next area out was shattered any-old-how by the shock wave and flung far; and the furthest-out rock was broken along its weakest lines and tumbled a short distance.

Further observation: the crusts run roughly perpendicular to the strata, and we haven't seen much in the way of non-horizontal strata in undisturbed rock, so the crusts were formed vertical. Crack-fill.

Poolio,

Thanks for the kind comments (and everyone else who's looked, too, I appreciate it!). I'd love to be able to say that I sit here tormented for days, hunched over a piece of parchmet, quill in hand, as wild-eyed and tousle-haired as Byron, fighting to put down in words the images that swirl around my mind... but um, no, it's just a case of grabbing at a random thought as it passes - maybe inspired by an image, or a small part of an image, or just an imaginary event - and then pinning it down and writing something around it. Sometimes - once every third or fourth Blue Moon! - it all comes out in a rush, and follows the express route from heart to brain to fingers and then to paper (ALWAYS paper first, then onto the PC), but most times it's a matter of spending several days mulling it over and over in my head, then grabbing a piece of paper and a pen and finding a quiet corner to hide in while I hurriedly jot down a "Hmmm, that'll work..." line when it suddenly comes to me.

Not suggesting for a moment my poems are important, or anything special, but they're mine, and they're how I see, and feel, and experience Mars and the rest of the universe, and, having seen my work up on the walls at JPL, I do have a hope that in the far future some of my MER poems will be put up on the walls in the MER gallery of the Smithsonian Museum of Mars, and read by native martians and tourists from Earth, Luna and the other worlds, and hopefully even enjoyed.

Here is my final version of the "Concepción interior" pan taken at Chocolate Hills (including Oppy at work on the intriguing rocks)



James

Good GRIEF James!!! That's unbelievable! I could just wander around that image for hours. And probably will...

Oppy's fairly scootling around Concepcion, isn't she..?

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I like this rock. Nice colour and surface texture contrast with the ones around it...

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I like the rover tracks.
I guess the rover drivers have great times those days.

Man, she cut DEEP through some of those dunes. Kinda scary.

I think it's just an ilumination artifact given the lower sun angle during martian autumn.

Here's the latest navcam mosaic taken during sols 2167 and 2168. Still circumnavigating but a little bit farther from CC to avoid crossing the ejecta ray.
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I think they are a little deeper than your average track, BooBoo...

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Across the dune crests they're deeper than usual, but not deeper than we usually see on dune crests

Okay...

Looks like a lot of spinning in place and slippage in this spot I circled on the image Stu posted.
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What makes you think it's slippage?

All we can see is a bit of sinkage.

Some tidbits from Salley Rayl's monthly MER report:

Concepción Crater's age:


Power levels during winter:


Activity during the circumnavigation:




I recognise these colours.

Maybe the impact rattled and fluffed up the dunes a bit and that's why there might be more wheel sinkage than usual.

Thanks for the summary, Tesheiner. It might be worth it for some readers to stress that "dinosaur bone" here means "something of interest" - no one on the team would think there may be real bones about.

Seriously, I'm always honoured when AJS Rayl uses any of my images in her excellent reports. I hope new members will click on that link and read the latest; like many of Emily's posts on TPS blog, it's a textbook example of how to write up a scientific news story.

Just noticed this. Was wondering if anyone knew what it was, and why it moved in one of the most recent rear hazcam shots.

Kapton tape?