Wow....not too far to go now

Well, it's quite a ways to Victoria. I'm thinking Erebus will be like Vostok.

This is the view ahead to the Erebus area... pancams from sol 437. At the top of my image I have cropped out the horizon and mosaicked the three frames together with a bit of tonal adjustment. The lower half is the near-horizon section of the above image with about tenfold vertical exaggeration. This is an interesting way to get a better feel for subtle topography near the horizon (I've been doing it for Viking Lander 2, trying to find its exact location, which is still not known exactly... more news on this later!)

So there will to be something to see at Erebus, but it's still hard to match what we see in this image to the MOC images.

Phil

Nirgal, I apologize for my late reply...
Image I posted is not a "colorized" one, but was obtained from two couples of subframes (512x512) taken wit PanCam using filters R1 and R2 and stitched by me. I know that these aren't real color filters, but I managed RGB balancing and "color dominance" in order to abtain most realistic results...
Incidentally, also I estimated about 200m distance from Voyager crater based on this picture...

Yes, and the interesting thing is that "grain [of etched terrain] is caused by the very large ripples"...
http://athena1.cornell.edu/news/mubss/
But, hey, nobody noticed that "bluberries" seem disappeared now!!??!!
Yes, we do not have recent microscopic camera pictures, but based on PanCam close-up like this below, now we have finer irregular-shaped objects!

I still see plenty of blueberries in there - but I think they may be becoming less dense, and mainly on one side of each dune.

Doug

Maybe...but wath about shape? It seems unusual to me...

I guess ones that spend their time further from outcropping are generally older and thus more erroded?

Doug

Yep, the blueberries are becoming less and less a percentage of the soils here. I'm still convinced we're seeing the deposition of the erosion products from the evaporite layer. Soil analyses of these lighter-colored dunes will determine that for sure, I imagine.

I'm still thinking that this isn't "true" etched terrain, regardless of what Squyres calls it. This is deposition of lighter-colored sand in the dunes. The "true" etched terrain is south and west of Oppy -- where there are exposed ridges of evaporite sticking out from the sand dunes. Ridges that look to me like they're the remnants of the ejecta "splash" from the ancient crater cluster of which Erebus is a part.

-the other Doug

I put this Pan together from the latest pancam images (I think)... all taken with the L2 filter.

WooHoo! An updated route map. It looks like it's about a half kilometer away, as the man said. It's still hard to say what we will see when we get there, but if the rim outcrops were much taller than the intervening dunes, they'd be more prominent by now. We'll need to be patient for another couple of hundred meters before we can start placing the serious bets.

Either that, or they are just very common in this area. we don't have data from other spots close by, so who knows..

If I didn't know any better I'd day that was taken out in the ocean on a calm day.
An ocean here on Earth by the by

Wonderful image. Thanks

jG

Another "false color" stitching from Sol 442

This is certainly a different way to map Oppy's progress