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

[Bill Harris]

Well, maybe, technically, but let's look at the granules and not the sands and the fines. So there.

The fines may turn out to be another issue.

Look at the trend to the larger granules to be pyramidal and not spherical or randomly sub-spherical. My initial thoughts are that these may be ventifacts since they seem to have a similar orientation. I'm thinking that the larger granules are "impact lapilli" or tektites, the basalt basal unit that has been melted, ejected and has formed droplets in free-fall. The smaller granules are hematite concretions, the standby Blueberries. The overlying evaporite unit was pulverized by the impact, thrown out as the ejecta apron where it weathered and eroded quickly, leaving the Blueberries behind. Methinks we'll find a lot of fragmented and residual evaporite under the desert pavement here.

My initial theory, but let's see what the Scratchplate shows. And we should be getting more MIs of the wheel trench this evening.

--Bill