By watching the dunes (the most beautiful variety so far) I can't decide the general wind direction. This is important to find the best place to get a solar panels clean up. I don't expect we'll find a better oppy for a while.

We may get a wind cleaning event here too....hopefully.

The darker dunes look like el dorado type at spirits landing site!

I hope they start a full Pan this weekend. Some of those ejecta-blocks look very interesting. Different from the usual boring Meridiani layered rocks?

That's the front right wheel. It's not steer-turned in > 5 years.

Polar maps derived from Tesheiner's pan:

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Phil

QuickTime VR version (5.3MB)

Gothrock:

The first thing that popped into my head when I saw this picture was where's my toboggan?

Stunning. I think this is the most picturesque crater we've seen so far. What Victoria had in size, Santa Maria makes up for in pure drama.

Fantastic! Here's the only anaglyph of the interior from the new set:
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And from mhoward's pan, just looking at the distance. Bopolu's gone now, presumably for ever.

Phil

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Scott Maxwell has posted what is presumably his version of the sol 2451 Navcam view of Santa Maria:

http://twitpic.com/3gulwc

http://twitpic.com/3gulwc/full

With this dark sand dunes over its inner rim, Santa Maria is definitely different from the previous craters visited. These dunes are really smooth, I wonder what is the grains size... Should be like El Dorado. BTW, congrats to the navigators, driving Oppy so close to the crater rim is really impressive !

Bit more processing on the Santa Maria pan from post #99

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The plan:

Mmmm, long baseline stereo...

Santa Maria

The Panoramic Navcam L0 view on Sol 2452.

Jan van Driel

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Adding a colourised pan, for fun.

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Mike
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Just catching up with things now (had to go to a pantomime... work thing... no, I wasn't the back end of a horse or donkey or anything...) and overwhelmed by the pictures everyone's been posting. Great work, Team UMSF! This is just a beautiful, beautiful place, isn't it? A fantastic array and variety of rocks and ejecta; geological gateau layering to study and drool over; Endeavour beckoning, siren-like, on the horizon (and has anyone else noticed how clear the hills of Endeavour look in these latest images?) Going to be an interesting couple of months or so...

I really like the wall of dark dunes, very reminiscent of our old friend El Dorado/Ultreya. This view has been sharpened and played about with to bring out some detail there...

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Does this look to anyone else like the lighter rubble is a landslide that's covered up the darker dunes? Hard to be sure - maybe the pancams will show us what happened here:
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And perhaps my favourite crop from the new navcams:
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It seems to look like the Santa Maria crater might have only exposed buried rubble (not layered sediment). If this turns out to be true, that the impactor slammed into a rubble deposit, not the layered sediments that we (well, Opportunity) have been traveling on, then we have some interesting things to think about.

Are we in the fill of an older crater represented by the broad depression we are on the West side of?

Have we crossed into the planed-flat zone of the rim ejecta from Endeavour? If deposition of the sediments continued after the Endeavour impact (likely), then some sediments would accumulate on the outer rim. If the whole thing then erodes flat, we would have an area of ancient rubble, planed flat, with perhaps a bit of additional sediment over it.

Better views, especially of the near (west) side interior crater wall, will help resolve this.

A sharp lookout for different rocks is a good idea.

Agree on the landslide Fred.

And this crop you made is where CRISM ID'd an interesting pixel (according to the latest press image page.)

The red circle marked there on Figure 1 indicates the pixel size and location of an observation by the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) .... The spectrum recorded by CRISM for this spot, unlike the spectrum recorded for the place indicated by the blue circle on the floor of the crater, suggests what might be a water-bearing sulfate mineral.

IIRC, this broken up rubble (or "breccia") is part of the crater formation process. Wasn't there a breccia layer atop the intact rocks at Victoria?

Right, but is there any visible intact rock here? Pancams might show something in the bigger outcrops, but now it looks as if we might not see any intact 'bedrock' here.

Phil

Hey EGD is that crop not showing the 2 o'clock position whereas CRISMs interesting pixel was about 4 o'clock?
The dark grains in the bowl really are a joy to behold...

I wanted to add a special note of thanks to Mike Howard for the frequent MidnightMarsBrowser metadata updates lately. It certainly is sweet to be able to spin around in the panoramas almost as soon as the images become available. Thanks.

I think we have seen pretty much the same, typical, impact cross section at Endurance, Victoria, and now at Santa Maria (although we haven't seen intact bedrock here, yet).

Top
-rubble and ejecta
-broken, but largely in-place bedrock
-intact bedrock
Bottom

Phil: Take a look at the cape on the east west side of the crater. It appears to be composed of "broken, but largely in-place bedrock." It seems that the side of the crater below where Opportunity is currently parked offers the best chance to have some intact or largely intact rock. The opposite side appears to be the most disrupted, with disruption possibly decreasing on either side as you come around toward the rover. Perhaps it's just a matter of how the crater has eroded. We'll have to wait until she goes around to another position in order to see, though. It would help to have some pancams to see if we can follow any bedding planes through some of the fractured blocks.

02453 p2297.07 49 0 0 49 2 100 pancam_santa_maria_13x1_L257R2
02453 p2298.07 49 0 0 49 21 119 pancam_santa_maria_13x1_L257R2

Anglyphed crop from sol 2451 navcam data.

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Added 1 image.
Panorama Sol 2451 R0.

Jan van Driel

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The rim looks crumbly. How do they decide how close to go?

Looking back at how Oppy rolled up to Santa Maria...

http://roadtoendeavour.wordpress.com/2010/...-to-santa-maria

(lots of pics so posting link to blog entry rather than the pix themselves)

I think eoincampbell's right - the "landslide" is not the same as the CRISM spot - the CRISM spot is this area:
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Looking back at the pics of Endurance, that crater had prominent layering visible around most of the circumference. Definitely a big difference from SM. But I don't see how it could be that we're looking into ejecta from Endeavour, as MarkG suggested - wouldn't that mean the rocks would be of completely different composition than the familiar Meridiani bedrock, since Endeavour predated the Meridiani deposits?

Could it just be that SM is fresher than Endurance or Victoria, both of which had prominent layering? Ie in a few million years (or whatever), maybe the broken up rubble/ejecta visible on the surface today will erode away, leaving intact layered bedrock underneath visible? Or do we expect any layered bedrock to be visible in a fresh crater?

Could this be a bit of layering starting to show through:
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Sounds right.

I agree.

Opportunity looks also at the Sun.

Here is a small animation taken on
Sol 2449 with the L8 Pancam.

What do we see?.

Jan van Driel

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It's too early for that to be Santa Claus... I can't think what would be as bright as the Sun. If it was something between Oppy and the Sun, it would have its dark side facing Oppy. If it was on the far side of the Sun, it would be fully illuminated but nothing should be as bright as the Sun. Maybe a bad spot on the CCD? It doesn't move the full height of the frame.

Venus went by around Dec 8th, but I don't think that is it. Maybe a hot pixl with the position of sun moving relative?

a hot pixel - if it were a thing it would be as bright as the sun through that filter - As the sun 'moves' the orientation of the camera (and pixel) changes

Agreed. I glanced too quickly at your first crop.

It's too sharp and too bright to be any solar system body of any kind outside the Martian atmosphere. That's the sun we are gazing at. So I dunno maybe dust migrating across the filter between shots, some kind of cascading hot pixel (if such a thing is possible) that is knocking out neighboring pixels? Something like that I would bet.

Definitely a hot pixel. You can tell because it's just one pixel. Any real source would be blurred by the optics to a few pixels at least. It appears to move because these solar frames are auto-cropped around the Sun, and for different shots the Sun is in different parts of the full frame. If you looked at the whole frame the hot pixel wouldn't move.

Slow news night, isn't it..?

This crater is absolutely mindblowing ! This is the most tortured impact formation ever seen on Mars by the MER, as far as I know.

During the trip to my parent's home (in Dordogne, Climber or Vikingmars should know) in train, I made the complete panoramic. A very stunning place.


Can't wait more for the color frames…

They are here!!! for your lives...

I am Red/Green colour blind, and usually have problems with Anglyphed pictures, but this one came out Great. Thanks
Mike

Exactly what it is - unless you've spent 7 years with your eyes closed, it's a familiar sight to every MER fan clicking through an MMB update.

What can we expect?
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Pancam stamps.

We leave this place before completion of panorama?
02454 p1212.09 2 0 0 2 0 4 front_haz_ultimate_2_bpp_pri15
02454 p1254.02 2 0 0 2 0 4 front_haz_fault_pri15_4bpp
02454 p1311.07 2 0 0 2 0 4 rear_haz_ultimate_1_bpp_crit15
02454 p1354.01 2 0 0 2 0 4 rear_haz_fault_pri15_4bpp
02454 p1966.09 20 0 0 20 0 40 navcam_10x1_az_162_mixed
02454 p1971.05 4 0 0 4 0 8 nav_2x1_rvraz_0_1_bpp_pri17
02454 p2129.02 4 4 0 0 2 10 pancam_cal_targ_L257R2
02454 p2129.02 4 4 0 0 2 10 pancam_cal_targ_L257R2
02454 p2129.02 4 4 0 0 2 10 pancam_cal_targ_L257R2
02454 p2260.08 7 0 0 7 2 16 pancam_santa_maria_2x1_L257R2
02454 p2299.07 52 0 0 52 2 106 pancam_santa_maria_14x1_L257R2

Dear Ant103, thanks for the quote. Your pan is just GREAAAAT and deserves 5 Mars wheels !

Ant, best pan I've seen for a long time, that's going up on my blog for sure (if that's still ok?).

But you made that on a train? On A Train?!? I sit here making my efforts in Mars Corner, struggling with alignments and rotations and vignetting and you just knock that out on a laptop, in a rattling train carriage, on a table covered with coffee cups and Twix wrappers, with a student snoring opposite you with his "tsss yss yssss" iPod playing in his ears?

Not really. I'm pretty sure the following shots will be taken before driving.
02454 p2260.08 7 0 0 7 2 16 pancam_santa_maria_2x1_L257R2
02454 p2299.07 52 0 0 52 2 106 pancam_santa_maria_14x1_L257R2