impressive view ...
here is a lens corrected and colorized version:

So here we are at last! Thanks, Nirgal. The range of contrast makes it look almost 'snow-capped'. What seemed so black at a distance, apparently wasn't all that distinct from the upper part. Just lots of lamination overhangs shadowing the sides. To be honest, I can't discern more than one laminated unit in this exposure.
I haven't spotted any 'festoons', either. Maybe we won't have cause to linger here long. One close-up view might tell the whole story. Anybody got other ideas?
Victoria beckons!

Wow - that is now one of my new favorites - great job!

Here is an L257 color image of the Mogollon outcrop from Sol 744. Nothing that astounding, although I did expect the bluff unit to be a bit darker than the overlying unit.

This is going to be a good area to study-- we have likely found our marker bed to correlate with.

--Bill

Hey, Bill, you're teasing us non-geologists with that kind of expression. "Our marker bed to correlate with." Please, explain to us what you mean by "marker bed". How is it distinctive from lots of other laminated evaporites we've seen since touchdown? If we are confronted with a five-meter exposure of laminated evaporites at Victoria (Oh God, Please let it be!), interspersed with 'festoon beds', volcanic tuffs, and other things I can't even imagine, how will we pick out this marker? Prof. Tim, can you help out explaining to us The Erebus Story ? I do think a lecture is needed.

Just an explanatory note: The dunes behind Mogollon rim appear higher because they are on higher ground than Oppy currently, right? They aren't such monsters as they appear

I think so.

As a side note, see what would happen if Oppy is on a leveled terrain with dunes actually high like that: A very close horizon and the view blocked by the dunes i.e. a maze. Let's hope there is nothing like that on the way to Victoria.

I think actually - some of these are biggies - as big as the ones we saw before on the North rim and skirted way north around.

I don't think they'll come up to camera height - we'll always be able to see over them, but we might have difficulty in planning longer drives

Doug

This is the current position (sol 745) as seen from the previous one (sol 742).

(117k)

Finally, the sol 744 pancams I was dying to see have arrived. The dipping beds I saw in the sol 742 navcams and described in post #73 are much more evident in the pancams. Fracturing and cover still make many of the contacts difficult or impossible to follow, but the geometry of the layering is apparent. Moving from right to left across this panorama, progressively younger layers come to the surface. I've used dashed and dotted lines to highlight the attached, cropped and annotated segment of my Autostitched panorama from the sol 744 L7 images.

Stay tuned!

Tom, the bedding geometry is quite apparent in this exposure and likely represents at least a local dip if not regional-- the orientation appears to be along the Erebus crater rim, so I don't think it reflects the upturned strata of the crater. We'll know more at the next Payson exposure, which is as prominent as this one from orbital imagery. Of equal or greater interest to me are the near-vertical joints and fractures.

>pancam_Payson_12x1_L7R1

Ah ha, so the NASA/JPL designation for this site _is_ Payson.

The dunes to the West and South are higher and appear moreso due to the view from _inside of_ Erebus. I'd suspect that this is due to orographic effects from the crater rim causing more sand to be deposited.

Again, if you don' t understand, Google is a lantern in the sea of enlightenment.

--Bill

Two pancam images from Sol 744 are tweened here in a Flash movie for a sense of the topography of these dunes. It's hard to triangulate to the ridge line that make up the horizon, but it looks like 150 - 200m away (with the outcrop back edge at about 40m from this vantage point).

Personally, I'd leg it up a dune for a good look to the south towards Victoria to see whether this is a real high point on the road to the south, or merely a matter of viewing from a dip, but then if I'd been driving Opportunity the mission would have ended months ago...

Andy

Your annotated image showing the dip within the unit below the planar beds is good. IMO the subsidence is fairly recent because you can see a point along the escarpment in Nirgual's image where the lower beds form a wedge and vertical displacement dies out further to the right. Illustrated by horizontal continuity of the upper planar unit. The lack of rubble off the cliff is also further indication of its age

The "drive-direction" pancams from sol 745 are available at the exploratorium: http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...cam/2006-02-28/

Check for yourselves, but imo Oppy will take the route to the right of Payson i.e. by the top of the rim.