Journey to Mt Sharp - Part 3A: In-situ science at the Kimberley, Sol 596 [Apr 10,'14] to 633 [May 18, '14] Options

[serpens]

It does seem as though, within this quite small area, we have two types of fracture fill. Some more heavily cemented and less susceptible to erosion than the host strata, standing proud of the surface and others that seem less well consolidated and readily eroded. Repetitive contractions can result in incremental deposition of fracture fill and a vertical laminated appearance. Alternatively, in less well consolidated fill a central eroded depression can result which could give a similar impression. I remember a paper relating these effects in the Arizona Navajo sandstones. I think maybe perhaps it was by Arthur Lachenbruch but my memory these days is somewhat untrustworthy. Regardless Kimberley was a well worthwhile science stop and it will be interesting to see what the experts come up with.

[nprev]

CR, re double or multiple walls: Perhaps a sign of dramatic temp drops (at night, presumably)l followed by thaws until the fluid was completely gone (either evaporated or chemically bound)?

[CosmicRocker]

I'm sorry it has taken me so long to respond, Nick, but I've been tied up with a new project over here.

I think freeze/thaw processes would certainly be something you'd want to consider when interpreting things like these which suggest the possibility of a periodic process. I've seen sediments where ice crystals grew in mud to create polygonal patterns, but in my experience they don't typically produce such a regular, hexagonal pattern as we are seeing in these MSL images.

I did a quick Google image search and found these few examples of ice crystals forming polygons in mud.

[tdemko]

I would add prismatic or columnar ped (soil) structure to the list of possible mechanisms to produce hexagonal jointing in sediments. The fracture fills would then have been produced by a subsequent void-filling episode of salt precipitation. Sounds like a plausible paragenetic sequence in a succession of deltaic or shoreline deposits that experienced repeated submersion and subaerial exposure.

Soil Structure

[nprev]

Very interesting, guys. As they say, "I'm not a geologist". Thanks!

[serpens]

These fractures are not necessarily subaerial, although such is most likely. But everything about Kimberley points to deltaic.

[neo56]

A few weeks ago, a UMSF member asked me if sol 627 pictures of Windjana drilled holes could be combined with Curiosity self-portrait taken on sol 613.
It took me some time to do this assembly and NASA was quicker than me.
However, I was working on the same kind of self-portrait but with Curiosity looking at the camera. Here is the result:

[neo56]

I figured out how to add an artificial sky on my panoramas. Here are some results I obtained. Enjoy!

[algorithm]

VERY nice. Maybe a little bit of orange as per your previous post? How about some BLUE

[neo56]

Thanks algorithm. For the sky colors, I assumed that MAHLI colors are the closest to natural colors (by the way, I really don't want to begin a debate on what the landscape would look like if we were there to see it). Therefore I made a sky with a radial gradient from grey to light maroon to white.

[dilo]

Beautiful works, neo56!
Perhaps you should correct hue on the hills in the first pano, above the line of horizon.

[neo56]

Thanks Dilo. I corrected the limit between the sky and the hills on the first pano, it was pixellised. But correcting the hue of top of Mount Remarkable is really not easy. I made the best I could with PTGui.

[dilo]

In fact, you need only to increase contrast on top of Mount Remarkable using a Photoprocessing software; this will adjust hue too, as showed in this "preview" (sorry for the OT, I promise this is my last post about this here):