Journey to Mt Sharp - Part 5A: Pahrump Hills, Sites 42-45, Sol 753-923, Sep 18, 2014-March 12, 2015 Options

[neo56]

I showed my animation of MAHLI selfies to Ashwin Vasavada and he identified a cleaning event on the rover between sols 613 and 868.
So I made a close-up animation on the device with a checkerboard pattern where the cleaning is particularly visible:


Here is the high resolution version.

[CosmicRocker]

Gerald:
Thank you very much. You're awesome! I am especially grateful for your examples showing me where to look to find the spectral data on my own.

Agate was a long shot, but this target remains a very interesting rock, nevertheless.

...
However, It's deceptive to try to form conclusions like this from visual appearance alone.

Aldebaran:
I didn't recall Spirit finding chert-like deposits, but I do recall her scraping up some opaline material with the dragging wheel.

For the record, that's why I said , "based on this image alone, one can't be certain," and why I was hoping to find some spectral data.

While a lot of cryptocrystalline quartz like chalcedony, chert, and agate occurs in volcanic amygdules and lithophysae, I suspect an even greater mass of these minerals have been deposited in sedimentary rocks on Earth.

[serpens]

Chert and agate are also associated with large impact structures so given the environment it was a reasonable suggestion.

[jvandriel]

The last images are down, Debayered and stitched.

Here is the complete panoramic view taken on Sol 901 and Sol 906.

Jan van Driel

[Herobrine]

In another thread, I was talking about the work I was doing with combining imagery from the science cameras with 3-D point clouds generated from engineering camera data. Data from Site 45 became available with the last PDS release, and I've created a map of the area around Site 45 / 160 by making a plan projection of the color point cloud I've been working on.
First, let me provide some context for this "map". Here's the location on the map provided at the Analyst's Notebook:

And here's the location on the map provided at http://curiositymsl.com/rovermap1.html

(the rover path appears to be a bit off on that map)

The image is very large. The scale is something like 5 mm per pixel.
Here's a preview of the full resolution:

The quality resolution and the image resolution are independent in the image. The quality resolution is dependent on the density of the point cloud in any given location. Most of the point cloud data came from NAVCAM data products acquired at Site 45 / 160, so for the most part, the quality is best closest to that spot. The area blocked by rover structure obviously comes from NAVCAM data acquired at other locations, so the parts nearest to the middle are actually much lower quality. Most areas near the edge of the image are similarly low quality.
Some areas are simply a blur because they were never in line-of-sight in any of the NAVCAM data I used or because they were too smooth to do photogrammetry for stereo data.
I did not make any attempt to balance the colors between images acquired under different lighting conditions, so the map is hard to interpret when zoomed out, due to the transitions between source imagery. Fortunately, the accuracy of the stereo data and the CAHV(OR) model data are so good that transitions between source imaging events produce lighting changes but do not introduce any noticeable misalignment.

The image is 5773x4851 and can be downloaded as a JPEG (7 MiB) or as a PNG (50 MiB).

[scalbers]

Here is the Book Cliffs area in VR as done by Scott Manley (pointed out to me by Sean):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e76uBfWxD74

This also looks good in an Oculus Rift as we are developing with SOS-Explorer.

Partial Sol 812 NRB pan, after driving to Book Cliffs:

[MrNatural]

Gerald:
Thank you very much. You're awesome! I am especially grateful for your examples showing me where to look to find the spectral data on my own.

Agate was a long shot, but this target remains a very interesting rock, nevertheless.



Aldebaran:
I didn't recall Spirit finding chert-like deposits, but I do recall her scraping up some opaline material with the dragging wheel.

For the record, that's why I said , "based on this image alone, one can't be certain," and why I was hoping to find some spectral data.

While a lot of cryptocrystalline quartz like chalcedony, chert, and agate occurs in volcanic amygdules and lithophysae, I suspect an even greater mass of these minerals have been deposited in sedimentary rocks on Earth.

Chert has some interesting preservation properties and John Grotzinger has published papers and blogs (http://mars.nasa.gov/blogs/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowBlogs&BlogsID=283) on chert so finding it in Gale would be rather exciting.