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

[Tesheiner]

(nope - can't match with PC - it's all too samey)

I suppose MMB can help. If not, pointing data on the data tracking web.

[djellison]

I don't believe any placement info for the MI is involved in the PCDB

Doug

[Nirgal]

Wow - nice MI sequence.....trying to merge with Pancam now

(nope - can't match with PC - it's all too samey)

very nice MI stitch, Doug !

couldn't resist doing a quick colorization of this one:

[dvandorn]

I would be really interested in seeing the mini-TES runs as we have approached the annulus and as we embark onto it. If the annulus is primarily hematitic, we ought to be able to determine that fairly easily with the mini-TES.

What will be very interesting is if the annulus does *not* appear very hematitic to the mini-TES...

-the other Doug

[Bill Harris]

Here is the current PanCam view of the sand at our feet/wheels, I'm thinking Sol 914 or so. There is an interesting change in the surface texture-- I can still make out the rounded granules but I'm seeing either angular fragments or flat areas with angular borders between between the granules.

Fooey. Nothing _on_ the ejecta apron, yet, this is from Sol 912 and is an L257 of the ripple trough we were at a couple of Sols ago...

--Bill

[hortonheardawho]

4 frames of sol 910 MI pan near Mossbauer press colorized:

[Bill Harris]

Whew, who said flat as a pancake! Here is an L7 Pancam from today showing aeolian and (possibly) anatolian features. I _think_ I have the location spotted on the MOC image, let me post this and go offline to check.

--Bill

[djellison]

That's several sols old....

Sol 912 - 10:38am

Doug

[mhoward]

Whew, who said flat as a pancake! Here is an L7 Pancam from today showing aeolian and (possibly) anatolian features. I _think_ I have the location spotted on the MOC image, let me post this and go offline to check.

--Bill

That's "Espanola" (East Hillock) in the forground, and ol' "Jesse Chisholm" in the background, on Sol 912, I believe. A 'Kodak' moment.

[Bill Harris]

Well, duh. You're correct; I was thinking that these "new images" were further along than they were.

Anticipation, I guess.

--Bill

[CosmicRocker]

When I saw that sol 912 L7 during my morning MMB update, I nearly jumped out of my seat. I had been waiting for a nice view of the step up to the edge of the apron, and was wondering why we hadn't yet seen a more impressive view of it. At least, that is what I interpret Espanola, and I suppose Jesse Chisolm to be now. Stratigraphically, it looks just like the Halfpipe formation, complete with the overlying layered ripples. The 3D view of it is impressive. As we drove further onto the apron I was seeing all of the dark pebbles between the sparse ripples and wondered why. I was expecting the apron to be totally different. I'll take my geologizing over to the halfpipe topic now.

[mhoward]

A quick stitch:

[Bill Harris]

In the lastest Navcam pans, we can see a light-toned area extending to the SE in the direction of Victoria's rim, and this area corresponds to the light-toned area between the windgaps in the crater rim visible on the MOC Route Map image. Close in, we can see that this light-toned material seems to be associated with the transverse ripples caused by the SE wind and we can assume that this light-toned material is likely eroded evaporite material from the rim of Victoria. I'd guess that the prominent dark streaks we see on the ejecta blanket are simply the absense of the light-toned dust. We'll see a a couple of Sols.

jvandriel's Sol 916 Navcam Pan

--Bill

[jamescanvin]

Just been looking at the tracking site for tosol (919) and I see we have this:

CODE

919 p2572.16 4   0   0   4   2   10   pancam_pre_trench_L257R1

Looks like we're going to put a trench in the annulus over the weekend.

Does anyone know if Oppy has done any (intentional ) trenching since the the steering motor failure? I can't remember any. I would imagine that that would affect they way trenching is done compared to what we saw back in the early days.

Should be an interesting weekend.

James

[Tesheiner]

> Does anyone know if Oppy has done any (intentional ) trenching since the the steering motor failure?

I was ready to say "Yes!", but then I saw the "intentional".