Victoria Annulus, Discusions about Victoria's Apron Options

[RNeuhaus]

From today, Oppy will start to head toward the Victoria Crater which is about 500 meters away. The drive would take about one month (that is 15 soles of driven with an average of 33 meters/sol, the other 15 soles would be for other purposes or restrictive soles).

The surface around Victoria Annulus, I seems it won't be as smooth as the way between Eagle and Endurance craters but the surface would have no uniform or parallel wave of sand and dust in small size of ripple. See Phil's Victoria Annulus partial map, Tesheiner's one Victoria Crater picture

Otherwise, the surface might have ripples smaller and alike to the ones of El Dorado, on the skirt south side of Columbia Hill. Besides, the Anuulus has no outcrops except to around of few small mini-craters.

This is a change of morphology of surface around the Victoria Annulus. What does it explain about this developing kind of surface of sand? Its extension is just around the inside of Victoria's ray of ejection. That is coincidence. Around that has no bigger ripples as the outside of Annulus.

The explanation would be that around annulus has smoother rock or outcrop surface, no blocks which had not helped to build ripples by the winds. Other factor, I am not sure, is that the slope from the border of Annulus to crater is positive (going up by few meters), then this might be another factor not to build ripples. I have seen that anywhere in the desert that have a slopes does not have any ripples but only flat surface.

Any debate about why the Victoria Annulus does not look like ripples as the outside of Annulus.

Rodolfo

[dvandorn]

And, like I said, Bill, the composition of the impact target makes a big difference in how much of the target is vaporized, how much melts, etc. If, for example, the target were mostly jarosite, or there was a thick layer of fairly pure jarosite, it would go from vaporization to pulverization with little melting in between. Some rock types simply don't melt in their primary form -- they pulverize into dust instead. And volatiles content affects the amount of mass vaporized, as well...

However, I rather doubt there was so much jarosite in Victoria's target as to inhibit widespread melting. My understanding is that the jarosite we've found is mostly in the blueberries, and the blueberries do not represent a large percentage of the evaporite down in this terrain. Though, if the blueberries resisted melting and were pulverized into sand and dust instead, that could explain the dark, smooth sandsheet remnants of the annulus.

-the other Doug