That's one of the things that I love about Midnight Mars Browser. Where else can one get such up to date information about the daily escapades of a robotic geologist on Mars.

If the theme is to be mineral veins and/or locales, I humbly nominate "Butte" for the next one after Deadwood.

"Deadwood"... I think..?

Yes, that's what it's labelled.

Thanks for the effort but your result seems counterintuitive, with maximum insolation occuring in the south polar region. Is the variable hours of sunlight, total energy received on a horizontal surface, or something else?

Steve M

I'll will check this (I have a raised eyebrow too!) but the midsummer southern hemisphere is just after perihelion - and that max insolation period is brief. What I think is happening is that, for a few weeks, the Solsworth of lowish-angle sunshine does surpass the incident energy of your average tropical day (which naturally is bracketed with your average tropical night).

Andy

My take on 'deadwood'. I tried some of the auto-flare removal improvements and other minor stuff... colors are bluer/whiter due to me driving the UV filter (for internal debug reasons)

Well...I think it was named after Ross the renowned scientist.

The intent of stopping at Deadwood is to characterize the rock through which Homestake apparently cuts. Squyres, Arvidson and company are very adamant about this piece of data to juxtapose with the content of the Homestake APXS data. The science team doesn't seem to think they -- Homestake and Deadwood -- are the same material at all.

As for RAT'ing or MB: only in our dreams. Long story short, we took a week-long detour that we expected to take only a few sols. The area ended up being so interesting to the science team that they convinced us to delay the trek. We need to boogey north on the double, because we only have so many sols to map the north-facing slopes and find our lily pads. Anything else scientifically intense will have to wait until after winter solstice (March 31).

There is, by the way a truly fascinating story to tell here about the pushback between science and engineering that has gone down over the last several weeks. The lesson of it all is that it has been an extremely productive week for the entire team. There are many considerations to evaluate when saying "we have x sols until we run out of time." It was questionable to take this detour given our need to rush north before certain things outside the control of the project take over and screw us, for lack of a better description. I would like to talk about a lot of these things in a blog post, but I need to wait until a) there's a press release on the Homestake content (hint: there'll be a press release soon!), since this is absolutely crucial to the discussion of tactical tradeoffs, and clear it with the project, since it would start peeling the paint off the proverbial privileged-information laws! So much cool stuff to talk about, so little room to do it right. (Hats off to the JPL media relations folks to, for keeping me steered on the right path!)

In any case, let me tell ya: it's been one hell of a week. The days I've been on tactical, I come home exhausted but enormously satisfied. We're really pulling off some magic -- not in sequencing complexity but in teamwork and engineering balancing acts. And the findings at Homestake are... well, pretty cool. Stay tuned. I'm signing off before I get any more proud and before I scoop the press release...

-m

Without giving anything away Matt, are we talking about conclusions based on camera filters and visible spectrum? Because as far as I can tell that's the only instrument that has been used on Homestake.

Thanks Matt!! I really love your input here so don't say anything that would end up gagging you!

Nope. From the latest update:

That became quite evident once we got Pancams of the spot-- the reddish tone of Deadwood make it appear light in unfiltered Haz- and Navcams. It is important to examine the Driftwood site, which apparently is an impactite/paleosoil that has been cooked and altered by the evident hydrothermal fluids of the Homestake veins.

What we see here are the age-old push-pull between exploration and production. Ah, to be a fly on the wall at these planning meetings. I'm thinking that "adamant" may well be an understatement.

Good info, and much appreciated.

Yawwwnn, no 00:35 imagery, maybe we'll get some later this AM...

--Bill

No, mostly APXS. But the Pancams also have a lot to say about Homestake...

-m

EDIT:



Don't hold your breath. Yestersol's plan contained... well, just about nothing (in the way of science). Not even a Tau, as far as I remember.

Today's planning will be busier -- drive+imaging in the queue, coming down sometime tomorrow morning.

-m

Indeed, this sure sounds like lots of APXS:


http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/mission/status_...rtunityAll.html