In case someone missed it - there is again some concern about bright material (in the scoop trench).

Some more from sol 66 - I asume Damien will release a nice full pan when all data is down then.



Big version here.

Some nice and interesting rock formations and some more white stuff lying around ...

Edit: To not spam the thread only with my posts here is a link to a nice Sol 66 mastcam anaglyph.

Edit2: BTW - I wonder where the debate has gone to, which was here some hours ago above my posts.

As noted the Curiosity team have certainly taken note of the bright particles...

"Confidence for going ahead with the third scooping was based on new assessment that other bright particles in the area are native Martian material. One factor in that consideration is seeing some bright particles embedded in clods of Martian soil. Further investigations of the bright particles are planned, including some imaging in the Sol 69 plan."

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2012-323

For those not (yet) following the daily news from Astrogeology's Ken ( MSL FAQ #12): Sol 69 news = MRO in safe mode; no news yet impact Glenelg program

To the extreme novice, bright material among all this would seem to me to be very very significant. Is there a reason why the science team isn't going bananas over these "native" bright materials? Is there some mineral that would be present on the surface that we should be so hum hum about?

Feldspar!

Most minerals here will be the ho-hum crust of Mars messed around by the Gale impact and brought in here by the mud flows or whatever built the alluvial fans emanating from the crater walls, or the winds which built this little dusty drift. The interesting stuff will be in outcrops, not here. This stop was mostly about cleaning the sample scoop and sample analysis system before they get to the good stuff. Basic rule - outcrops good, loose stuff boring. Not entirely boring of course, it is Mars after all, but outcrops are where the really interesting stuff will be.

Phil

His detailing of the "schmutz" concerns on Sol 67 and Sol 68 are also informative.

Looks like ronald beat me to the link in the previous post. In any event-- they think it's nonnative schmutz.

Oh, I'm sorry - did not want to hurt anyone

To sad that the 34mm pan from Sol 66 had some serious focus issues - so only a slim pan this time.



Really some wild formed rocks nearby!

You think so? Haven't noticed much of anything yet that appears feldspathic, and IIRC earlier landers found feldspathic materials primary as very fine grains in the ubiquitous dust layer. Same thing with the carbonates -- they're there, but mostly as very fine grains well-mixed into the primarily basaltic dust.

Heck, even the fine-grained Martian basalts we've seen at the various landing sites seem absent of the plagioclase laths often seen in terrestrial and lunar basalts.


This is the exact point I've been making about the Gale floor from the beginning, and it's a lesson we seem not to have learned real well from earlier landings. Yes, it's crazy-interesting when we find anomalous rocks strewn about, but at the V1 and Pathfinder sites especially we found that the rocks themselves were a crazy-quilt scattering of materials washed there by ancient floods. Here in Gale, a lot of the surficial rocks seem to have been washed there by running water, as well -- be they floods, encroaching seas or even just small streams running down from the central mound and from the rimwalls.

Yes, it's interesting to look at the depositional process in terms of how the rocks got here and the kinds of transport that could have been involved. But the rocks themselves are scattered, there is no real stratigraphic information to be gained from them, and since they (for the most part) did not form in place they contribute very little to our understanding of the landform(s) on which we happen to be standing at the moment.

Now, the lithification of the muds that slid in when these larger rocks were emplaced from their origin points to where they sit now, yeah -- that's rather interesting. But except for those places where the lithified muds are exposed (as, perhaps, at Glenelg), and especially where they haven't been torn up by post-emplacement events like impacts, these beds seem to be primarily buried under detritus that's been transported in from elsewhere. I sure hope there are enough strata exposed here at Glenelg for us to get a good handle on the alluvial deposition sequence.

-the other Doug

All the great imagery of Glenelg has me wondering if we were to blow all of this Mars dust away from the sites in front of us, is there an Earth analog that might be comparable? Also, again after a giant wind scouring of the site by a cosmic giant, would we actually be able to see some kind of recognizable channeling or patterning of these outcrops that would be indicative of an alluvial fan here on Earth.

Here is an attempt at a cross-eyed view of the "schmutz" from the Sol 67 MAHLI images of the scooped area. Be nice, I'm still learning, and I know the are very widely separated so it's kind of a stretch. Note the brightness doesn't seem to be just a specular reflection because it does appear in images a few hours apart, and in shadow.

It seems they've decided it's not native... I still can't see what it resembles other than a smoldering cigarette butt, though...

Hey, folks. Apparently the Sol 64 and 66 mastcam 100mm images are meant to be as one. Since some of our computers can only handle so much, I had to stitch them separately by the day, then stitch those together, hehe. It's 45,500 pixels wide so far, so I thought a Gigapan would be the best option:

http://gigapan.com/gigapans/116703



Really small image of it:

What makes you say that? In this recent update they say that these "bright particles in the area are native Martian material".

I stand corrected, I read through the USGS update too hastily.

Looking forward to seeing what they find out.