Geomorphology of Gale Crater, Rock on! |
Geomorphology of Gale Crater, Rock on! |
Sep 26 2012, 10:22 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3516 Joined: 4-November 05 From: North Wales Member No.: 542 |
I'd like a discussion thread about the geology detatched from the time limits of current MSL threads. We had a 'Geomorphology of Cape York' thread that attracted a lot of interesting posts. How about 'Geomorphology of Gale Crater'? I have one or two ideas but many more questions, and I'd like to post them in a longer-running thread away from the day to day imaging discussion. Any other takers?
For starters, does anybody have a contour map of this place like the one at Meridiani with 5m intervals? ADMIN: You have your wishes fulfilled on UMSF (sometimes) |
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Nov 30 2012, 07:37 PM
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#2
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3516 Joined: 4-November 05 From: North Wales Member No.: 542 |
That's fine for HTIF and HP, but going on Anderson and Bell's map there should be no LTIF at our current location. They have the LTIF mapped to the north of the HTIF while we are to the south of it, hence my query.
http://martianchronicles.files.wordpress.c.../09/figure7.jpg |
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Nov 30 2012, 09:22 PM
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#3
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2530 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 321 |
I've been thinking that the landing site was HP, having missed the fan, as you say, to the north. But our confusion is, I think, owing to the inherent complexity:
The distinctions we're talking about are not necessarily visible or even rigorously meaningful. Thermal inertia is a property that can vary from place to place on the basis of any combination of changes in composition or fine-scale morphology in potentially-wicked interaction between the visible surface and the near subsurface. Maybe MSL landed outside the area that Anderson and Bell colored as "fan" on their map, but is nonetheless in an area where the fan material is present, but in combination with other stuff so as to give it a different thermal inertial. In fact, there's no logical disconnect between these labels: "high thermal", "fan unit", "hummocky", and "plains" are potentially overlapping in any combination because they four different kinds of property. I think MSL missed the region that A&B labeled as being the fan, but may in fact have some of that fan material all around, in some fraction, anyway. On a very similar theme, I was surprised, having read A&B carefully, how difficult I find it to see the units on Mt. Sharp, which seem apparently in the B&W images taken from orbit, in the images from MSL. There are many possible reasons for this, including the viewing geometry, the image properties (such as gamma), my lack of field geography savvy, etc. A&B did a good job of imposing some logic and order on Gale, but in both the MSL landing site and the distant views of Mt. Sharp, things seem a little more chaotic up-close. |
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