I confess yearnings until we saw the closeups. But ... WOW.

What's the ugly seam-looking thing at lower left?

A quick - and not very carefully controlled - reprojection of Emily's blog panorama:

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Phil

Looks like it was in the midst of splitting in two.

Anybody have a guess at how big that black couch-shaped rock in the middle distance is? (Actually it's not shaped like a couch at all but it reminds me of "Couch rock" from Pathfinder)

Because Meridiani is so flat and level there's a simple trick you can use to estimate the size of things. The idea is that on level ground, the line-of-sight to the horizon will be camera-height above the ground, no matter what the distance. The navcams are about 154 cm high, so it must be close to 154 cm from the ground under the rock to the horizon, like this:
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Then to estimate the width of the rock you just measure the ratio of width to height from the image. That gives about 30 cm for the width. Of course if the horizon is sloping that could throw you off by some percentage...

Oh yeah, there's also the rule that things almost always look bigger than they actually are.

I finaly understand how you used to set your Men in Black or whaterver you called them.
Very instructive, thanks

Cool, thanks for that helpful explanation. Future blog post for sure!

The "Mystery Man" is Fred's and Fred's alone, even though you know how to place it in images. However, I have gone ahead and created for you two choices of your own mystery man, a "climber" and a cliché American movie image of a Frenchman. So you can take your pick. Always glad to help.

Alternatively, you could use a figure that is not only popular but revered:

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Thanks guys. I save the Climber mystery man to be used when we'll arrive at some "mountains", not for the $£%??!ùù%$$€€ meteroites.

Don't be so hasty, Climber!

Phil

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Lot's of closeups now down:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...1M1.JPG?sol2369

And eyeing our next target?
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...1M1.JPG?sol2369

A face only a mother (or a geologist) could love:
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Fascinating star-stone...

From this angle, it looks like an eroded bronze sculpture of a pigs stomach. Maybe that says more about me than the meteorite.

Doug: EWWWWWWWWWWWWW!

I feel like I should apologise to this meteorite. I called it "ugly" a couple of days ago, but it's actually a beautiful, bizarrely contorted, tortured and torn slab of scientific goodness.

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Look at the ragged-edged vein down there on the left... the cavities near the centre... all the rough and ragged edges on the cavity's right... just wonderful...

I envy the collector - native martian rockhound or money-to-burn Terran - who has that on his or her desk one day in the far future.

Edit: more pix at: http://roadtoendeavour.wordpress.com/2010/...island-revealed

Check this out for very interesting info. on the naming of Oileán Ruaidh.

http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php/10...454#post1794454

Note also that the opening post in that thread links to an item in the Donegal Islands news -- from March!
http://www.donegalislands.com/newsletterdetail.php?id=27

Can any of the Imaging Experts in here find all the Iron Meteorites Opportunity has found and post them all next to each other?

I would like to see how each one looked compared to the others?

We could rate each one on a scale of 1 to 10???

Well speaking as a Gaelic speaker I'd have pronounced the island part "Ill-awn" and red is "Rua" but there are fairly broad variations in pronounciation. The Ruaidh spelling is a little archaic but not totally out of line. For something this size we'd usually have called it "Carraig Rua" (Red Rock) , things have to fairly big to be called islands.

Bobby, I made this a while ago - it's not to scale, and the images are colourisations of cruddy raws, but you might find it interesting... I'll have to make an updated version now.

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Here's an item with a January 2010 dateline and a less than flattering headline on plans to use the Oileán Ruaidh name.

Irish island twinned with Mars in climate change stunt

Thanks Phil, I'm now the first Earthling having set foot upon a meteroite on Mars!
Call me Neil Climber.

I am impressed that there is no impression under these meteorites. I would assume that the speeds needed to melt the iron would be such that there would be some type of disruption of the area underneath. I assume that I am missing something. Even if a larger meteor hit elsewhere and produced the smaller meteorites from a secondary explosion, I would think that you would see some evidence of this.

I think the theory is that, in time martian soil just erodes from under the hard iron meteorite, destroying any remnants of impact in the process.

That's why they call them MEEtiorites!

Now it's time for IDD work.
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Interesting view...

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Bobby set me wondering just how all these magnificent meteorites would look alongside each other, so I decided to make a comparison pic. But listen, this is just a bit of fun, ok? I'm not claiming these pics are 1000% accurate, alright?

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Will be able to do better when I have more time. But I thought it was a fun idea.

In the "official" version, that last one should sport the name Oileán Ruaidh.

Yep, absolutely.

What an amazing journey!

What? IDD? Drive, drive, drive, drive!

Oh well, maybe the actuators need a rest once more

I have an interesting Question: If these are Iron Meteorites and they have been on Mars for a very long time.
Why is there no rust on them? I don't know if the air there has enough water to create rust on them?

One possibility I would think is wind erosion that is eroding these meteorites already, would clear any signs of rust (If any). There is a few interesting area's which I have noticed on Heat Shield Rock which I thought looked like rust. But how can one really tell for sure on these meteorites in an environment that has Iron Oxides all around?

Closeup anaglyph (very hard to adjust these closeups properly, so may cause headaches in some):
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That is a very beautiful anaglyph - you won't hear any headache complaints from me, Fred.
But in response to Bobby's question, the bottoms of the pits do clearly have a darker color than the rest of the rock surface.
They could be just physical accumulation of larger windblown dust grains, but how to rule out actual rusting?
On Earth a pitted hunk of iron left outdoors would likely begin to rust at the bottoms of the pits.

Is there any chemical difference between "Mars dust" and "Meteoric rust" that would let the IDD differentiate between them?
Even if there were, it would probably require a super-RAT to deliver the instruments to the right spot.

I think that is an interesting question worthy of some discussion. At first I dismissed the thought, thinking one would probably not expect a nickel-iron alloy to rust in the Martian atmosphere, considering that the atmosphere contains virtually no free oxygen. However, I think the oxidation potential of the surface environment needs to be considered.

The Phoenix mission discovered perchlorates in the soil. I would think these reasonably strong oxidizing compounds would facilitate the corrosion of metallic iron if liquid water was available mediate the reaction. In the absence of such oxidizing agents I would suspect that UV radiation in that sparse atmosphere might be able to dissociate some CO2, H2O, or other oxygen containing compound to generate some rust with the help of a solvent. If iron oxides cannot be formed, how about some other oxidation products like iron halides or other products of corrosion? It seems that it might not be impossible to oxidize some iron on Mars. What does that imply?

James Sorenson's sand-blasting idea seems reasonable. Rust or other corrosion products are fairly soft. It wouldn't take much wind erosion to remove a bit of rust from a meteorite laying on these wind swept plains. But if these iron meteorites were corroding AND eroding, we would not still see fine features formed by the entry of these meteorites into the atmosphere. I'm speaking of ablation features like the regmaglypts we've seen on some of these meteorites. We've also seen fine, wire-like protrusions of metal into some of the cavities of these metallic meteorites. They suggest that these were originally stony-iron meteorites of some kind. Such protrusions would have been obliterated if the metal was being chemically and physically assaulted.

I'd have to conclude that these hunks of metal have not experienced significant rusting since they fell, but that they would have rusted if liquid water had been available to them.

Rather than post them all here, there are some new images up on my blog...

http://roadtoendeavour.wordpress.com/2010/...eorite-goodness

Most interesting meteorite yet, I think...

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More pix on my blog, here...

Do we have an order-of-magnitude figure for how long these meteorites have been sitting around at Meridiani? 10^6 years? 10^8?

Liked your "Fishing Stories" series of rock shots a lot
FredK
That 3D is stunning, it will cost me quite a few aspirins 'cos I like it a lot
Mike

Sol 2369 L3/L5/L7 composite of Oileán Ruaidh
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A fantastic drive direction mosaic came down from sols 2369 & 2370. Tracks, ripples, nearby and distant pavement, (possibly) another meteorite and the 'twin peaks' on the north rim of Endeavour. What more could you want?

Well, James, I'm certainly sated by that view. Thank you!

This and a glass of water, and I'm set! thanks jc

Scott Maxwell's most recent tweet:


Back on the road again!

Amazing Picture James

I would go to the next meteorite nearby then off to the rocky area ahead where Opportunities wheels might have to
wiggle around them. I'm also wondering where all those rocks up ahead came from? I don't see a visible crater in
that area where they could have been blown out from? Could they be small meteorites? I also hope we get moving
soon.

Well, not even I can complain about scooting past the next meteorite, not after we've seen something as amazing as this...

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I think this most recent meteorite was the most impressive yet but yes, time to move on...

I saw the drive-related imaging plan on the pancam website before coming here but thought it was just another move on the circumnavigation. Now, with this fresh info about leaving and "drive-by shooting" I think I know the name of that other meteorite:

02374::p1949::04::2::0::0::2::0::4::Navcam_Ireland_3_bpp_pri_57

Hmmm. Guess they've exhausted the list in the "Big Book Of Where-The-Hell-Is -THAT? Little Island Names" and have moved on to "Everyone Knows Where That Is" islands...

Still holding out for a "Craggy Island"...