Post Conjunction: Santa Maria to Cape York, The Journey to 'Spirit Point' |
Post Conjunction: Santa Maria to Cape York, The Journey to 'Spirit Point' |
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![]() Senior Member ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Admin Posts: 4763 Joined: 15-March 05 From: Glendale, AZ Member No.: 197 ![]() |
Starting a new topic to include Eduardo's Google overlay for the rest of the journey to Cape York:
http://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/gmars_ma...41_1775_RED.kml Follow the link above and it should load right in to your Google Mars features. I took a low crow's flight along the final 6km this morning. Below in green is what I think the final route will look like. Also an interesting feature along the way that appears to be a cluster of rocks, possibly Santa Maria ejecta, or large meteorite fragments. Note how the dune has evolved around the three (or more) objects. Object is at -2.199395°, -5.396676° -- roughly 3km down range from Santa Maria. EDIT: bad link replaced, wider context image added for three rocks. -------------------- If Occam had heard my theory, things would be very different now.
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![]() Senior Member ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 2228 Joined: 1-December 04 From: Marble Falls, Texas, USA Member No.: 116 ![]() |
... Yes; if there was anything interesting to see in the "dark terrain", it was too subtle at least for me to pick out. Oh well... onward! ... Not much obvious to see, but the surface was noticeably rougher. Elsewhere we had the extremely smooth surface with tiny ripples, as at Eagle crater. Here we had a generally rougher surface, and to me it looked as if a layer about 10 or 20 cm thick had been eroded away to reveal it. It would be interesting to map the distribution of the darker patches all around this area, to see it the distribution offers clues to its origin. ... It was pretty subtle, alright. Honestly, I was expecting it to be significantly more exciting. I'd have to agree with Phil regarding the surface appearing to be rougher. I was pretty much perplexed until it occurred to me that this dark terrain may simply be a large exposure of the Halfpipe formation. Some of us geologizers had previously started a thread devoted to the Halfpipe formation, where it was revealed that the name was informally applied to certain dark patches of coarse material overlying bedrock. I think one of the best exposures of the "formation" was observed on sols 707-717 as shown in the image I posted almost 5 years ago in the Halfpipe thread. See also, this comment. This is just another reminder about how much fun it has been to do armchair planetary geology through the rover's eyes. ![]() -------------------- ...Tom
I'm not a Space Fan, I'm a Space Exploration Enthusiast. |
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