Is the launch point going to be in one of the scour marks from the descent stage's engines? Might be less dusty....

I wonder how much of a dust cloud it will kick up and how much that will interfere with its imagery. I guess we will find out, but I am not setting my expectations too high.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I am really, really impressed by the performance of the Terrain Relative Navigation (TRN) during EDL. If you look at the landing site, you can see all sorts of hazards such as dune fields and boulders that TRN successfully avoided. Congrats to the team; I cannot imagine how challenging the engineering was for this.

I had a different sort of EDL question: does the thickness of Mars' atmosphere vary enough to necessitate course and trajectory corrections just before EDL?

Would someone care to comment on the CU enrichment? To me it seems fairly significant. IIRC, the Deep Impact mission used a copper impactor because CU is so rare in comets, and I think it is fairly rare on rocky planets which implies some sort of enrichment process. Would this enrichment imply some hydrothermal action?

Climbing Mt. Sharp was never the goal of the mission, but a primary goal was the "Clay Trough" (https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2017/pdf/2531.pdf). MSL is about to reach the this unit so stay tuned; it should be very interesting.

Could the methane be off-gasing from plastics on MSL? Or breakdown products of plastics exposed to UV and temperature swings?

Not sure if MSL has reached the Clay Unit, but given the softness of this rock and its visual appearance, I would think that this would be a good place to try the new drilling strategy. I suspect that ever since MSL landed, the team has wanted to analyze the Clay Unit with SAM, even if MSL has run into clay at many other drill sites (but these clay's were not visible with CRISM).

Would anyone care to speculate about what we are looking at? The softness of the rock and the color certainly suggest phyllosilicates / clays, but I would expect hematite on Vera Rubin Ridge.

No, the worry is about exposure to cosmic rays, solar wind, and day-night temperature cycles. Also perchlorates might winkle their way into the samples (unlikely). Of course, if the drill is only a few inches long or if the samples are very well shielded then the point may be moot. If not and the samples are coming from further underground then this could be a factor in breaking down any organic chemicals that might be in the samples.

Not a farce, but a complex and intriguing issue. The original motivation appears to be the Planetary Science Decadal Survey requirement for the next Mars mission to support the Mars Sample Return mission. Unfortunately the budget does not support the followup missions with the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) so we are left with a quandary.

There are two ways to support the MAV, one is to have 2020 do all the roving and bring the samples to the MAV and the other way is to land another rover in addition to the MAV to pick up the samples. This is where it get interesting; the first case is a lot cheaper but, the 2020 rover has to survive long enough to be able to get to the MAV. The second case, landing another rover with the MAV, is a lot more expensive but more likely to succeed; however I suspect that Planetary scientists would be loath to land a second rover in the same place unless the potential was truly exceptional. Then there is the issue of degradation of the samples; the longer it takes to get the MAV to the 2020 location, the less compelling the samples become. At some point one has to wonder if we are sending a MAV with a rover, we might as well have the rover drill fresh samples.

Is the Hematite Ridge and clay layer visible in this image?

I wonder how old this fracture is. I was under the impression that finding freshly-exposed subsurface rocks was highly desirable since these rocks would have been offered some protected from cosmic rays and solar wind, potentially preserving organics.

Would someone care to comment on this conglomerate? To my untrained eye, it does not appear that the pebbles are very rounded suggesting that this did not form in a high-energy streambed as some of the conglomerates seen early in the mission appear to be.

Chert has some interesting preservation properties and John Grotzinger has published papers and blogs (http://mars.nasa.gov/blogs/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowBlogs&BlogsID=283) on chert so finding it in Gale would be rather exciting.

The whole planet really, really needs a nice cleansing rainstorm; oops, I guess we missed that by 3.5-4 billions years (if ever).

Actually the big question for me is whether this red coating is skewing CRISM results and maybe Mars has a lot more clays and hydrated minerals on the surface than was originally thought. Maybe the "missing" carbonates are really there, but masked by the red dust....

Could the translucent grains be Olivine grains?

I don't know about the rest of you, but I found this MAHLI set of images to be rather extraordinary. Would a geologist care to comment on this? To my untrained eye, it appears to be rounded (stream-borne?) gravels deposited in what appears to be in a loosely sorted out-wash area. Obviously these gravels have been seen earlier in the MSL trip to Mt Sharp, but this appears to be another example, or am I wrong?

Resistance to wind erosion, right?

I have to ask the obvious question here. What does the stratigraphy in places such as Jubilee Pass, Panamint Butte, and Upheaval Dome tell us? Are these lacustrian or streambed deposits? There appear to be hundreds of layers visible (and they are probably but a small section of thousands of such layers). If these represent sedimentary cycles, then that implies a lot of water or at least a lot of transient water events.

So much evidence, except the basalt, seems to indicate a very wet environment that I have to wonder if the Noachian/Hesperian water was different than water today on Earth. Can experiments be done with crushed basalt and water that has little free oxygen (or maybe dissolved ammonia or CO2), or is it too slow to observe?

Speaking of empirical evidence, how does MSL's DAN's findings work with these theories? As we know, DAN is detecting water (in hydrated minerals?) in the subsurface, with a patchy distribution, but I am not a geologist/geochemist and am not qualified to interpret these readings. Can anyone here speak to these findings?

http://www.spaceflight101.com/dan-science-reports.html

OK, at the risk of being kicked off this board for silliness, here is a plain link to the site for "Blueberry Taro Lava Rock Muffins" (complete with olivine grain topping), perfect for your next Mars Petrology party:

http://www.guavarose.com/2011/11/blueberry...a-rock-muffins/

ADMIN NOTE: Let's keep stuff like this for the MSL Humour and other stuff thread.

Of course (smacking my forehead). Good call.

For your amusement, here is an edible version of olivine and lava, ha!

Calcite? Pure speculation at this point. It would be interesting to see this grain with MSL's ultraviolet (UV) LEDs and see if it will fluoresce...

Actually I see two amber grains or one clear amber grain and another smaller possibility.

Remember when MER-B landed in shallow Eagle Crater, and planetary geologists went wild because of the layering on the crater walls? I imagine the same reaction when these images come down from MSL...wow, amazing scenery day after day.