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

[CosmicRocker]

This kind of surface is very easy to drive as off-road. Is indurated and compact as Bill has said. It seems like that the surface has undergone a process of some kind of cementation caused by some kind of chemical reaction.

Do you have any idea about why the surface has got indurated?

Rodolfo

I think the main reason the surface here is firm and easy to drive on is that the soft, layered ripple material is substantially absent. The underlying material is a good surface to drive on, and I am guessing it is pretty much the same material Opportunity drove on earlier in the trek, before the ripples came to dominate.

After looking back at many of the scuffs and trenches Opportunity has made along the way, I am nearly convinced that this white stuff is possibly best explained by some kind of a salt concentration mechanism, as it appears to be a horizon that cross cuts soil stratigraphy but is not continuous. The thing I am finding most interesting lately, is how looking back at old images leads me to new thoughts. It is very different from chasing the latest images for new thoughts. A lot of information has been collected that I had previously glossed over. There is still a lot of low-hanging fruit.