Note - the rover can not look at loose sediments NOT near it's path. Observational bias.

If any of you are in doubt, btw, the MSL drill is powerful, it's loud, it's highly energetic. I saw an EM in action, and even from 5-10ft away, it was fingers-in-ears loud.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrfM9dbd1e0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3nSHi14dUM

If it gets you down too much - just think of it as motion blur.

Indeed - we don't really know what it is - which renders comment even more meaningless.

It is what it is - no point complaining and moaning about it.

That image received 898,002 views on the 29th alone, over 954,000 in total. Thanks Reddit.

I used PTGui with a Stereographic-Down projection.

My go at it!
http://dougellison.smugmug.com/Landscapes/...ity/i-h8tgjCn/A

Used an old trick from processing MOC imagery - take a version of images with that vertical streak - reduce to 1 pixel height - stretch back out to full size, invert, and then use to back out that bright streak. Works pretty well.

I think it was stowed for the top tier and deployed for the couple of frames on the bottom.

I doubt it's a sun-dog/halo. Those are 22 degrees from the sun usually, and this looks to be at least one NavCam FOV (45 deg) from the sun

Simulations here http://www.atoptics.co.uk/halo/owmars.htm

More likely an internal reflection from the camera

They're not retakes - look at the motor count - they're slightly different focus points.

That's a virtually unplayable and pointless game of what-if. The majority of the MER landing site selection process was driven by engineering anyway.

As @Matt_Heverly pointed out - lovely panorama on Sol 606.
(full size here - http://dougellison.smugmug.com/Landscapes/...norama-crop.jpg )

They're visible as more than that in ground based observatories.

'Close' to Pluto though NH may already be, and amazing though LORRI is - for KBO searching it doesn't come close to the capabilities of larger ground based observatories for large area surveys.

Dimmer than Uranus as seen from the earth - approx 6.7 according to Horizons ( http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/ ) - because right now Saturn and Uranus are on opposite sides of the solar system

There's a great display that will autonomously flick between realtime telemetry driven and predicted trajectory

http://ladeestk.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/preview.cgi

As we saw at John Klein / Yellowknife Bay.

These may surprise you - but the left-right pairs of NavCams / Hazcams ( and even Pancam on MER ).... are not all oriented the same. On MER they tended to be flipped over ( one side would be upside down compared to the other ) simply because of cable routing and packaging.

With MSL - The A-Side computer Navcams are oriented the same way - but the B side are not. Looking Curiosity in 'the face' - the top two NavCam's are A side. The bottom are B Side. The black circle is bottom right on all of them, apart from the left B side Navcam which is rotated 180 degrees.

1976 - the landform in question was imaged.

In the 16 years before that, 23 missions were launched to Mars.

In the 38 years since, only 20 missions have been launched.

Were that argument to hold water, we would have been back to the moon a thousand times since 1969, and the popular formation in Cydonia would be knee deep in spacecraft.

The URL for those interested
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/cassinifea...eature20140414/

That's very compelling!

Burning a couple of weeks ( 160 m there, 160m back...that's 1/3 of a km wasted, a few $10M's worth of MSL's prime mission ) would, truly, be diverting away from science.

Moreover - such observations would not silence any conspiratorial dialogue.

We have more MastCam images due to come down of that spot - which will probably show that rock isn't the culprit, leaving us utterly with benign imaging artifact explanations. Time to move on, and get some science done.

Dust Devil? We know what those look like, and it's not that.

Bandwidth is rarely a constraint on activities such as this. Time available in the rovers schedule as well as power is the limit. Consider - while the rover is doing this, it can't be driving / doing other remote sensing / using the arm etc etc. Moreover, the mast can not be pointed sunward for extended periods - there are rules that constrain the duration of sun-pointed activity to avoid damaging ChemCam's optics.