The western route, 5th leg after stop at Absecon / Reeds Bay Options

[Tesheiner]

Time for a new thread.
After moving southwards for ages, the "detour" by the western path has started with a 60+ meters drive on sol 1942.


There are no images yet --they should be available on the next update-- so this image was calculated solely based on the rover's mobility info. I'll update the route map later.

[serpens]

On this sandblasted plane Block Island is large enough to have caused local wind variations and isn't it possible that the larger ripples in the immediate area could be attributable to this rather than crater remnants? If BI is ejecta rather than an asteroidal meteorite then the impact could well have been at terminal velocity for Mars or less. No more than 1 km/s? That wouldn't punch a particularly large hole. We could even be looking at ejecta from Victoria. So even if it does have the composition of an iron meteorite, if it is a fragment spalled from the Victoria meteorite on impact it would again have hit at less than terminal velocity.

If it is a Victoria impactor fragment spalled on impact and ejected does that make it ejecta or meteorite?

[centsworth_II]

...if it is a fragment spalled from the Victoria meteorite on impact....

My impression is that Victoria is too old for anything spalled from it's impactor to be lying on the current surface. Weren't we speculating a while back that Victoria* was formed before the hundreds of meters of sediment that Opportunity is traveling over were laid down?

*edit: Oops, getting my craters mixed up.. That was Endeavor. But the speculation on Victoria was that it was so old that it has been covered over and uncovered by deposition and erosion, still making it impossible that the current surface could be the surface on which part of it's impactor fell.

[nprev]

...has been covered over and uncovered by deposition and erosion...

Actually, I think that's really the key concept to understanding the Meridiani meteorites. It doesn't seem like we see much exposed bedrock aside from regions near craters or between dunes. I get the impression that the environment is similar in one respect to Antarctica or glacier tops: the surface gets buried & exhumed periodically, and quite often what isn't sand or snow turns out to be meteoritic.

If this model's true, then these meteorites are probably all one-shot unrelated objects & not secondary artifacts of larger impacts.