Traverse to the Delta, sols 379-414, 15 Mar 2022- 21 Apr 2022 Options

[Phil Stooke]

Starting a new thread as we leave the landing site and start the drive around Seitah. It will probably be quite fast unless something interesting turns up in the ejecta of the craters along the path.

Here is a circular panorama for sol 379, already north of the landing site. Maybe there will be some drive-by shots of the landing site itself.

Phil

[neo56]

Panorama taken with Mastcam-Z Left on sol 406 at 9:30 am LMST. It's a pleasure to zoom in to dive into the wealth of details!

[Saturns Moon Tit...]

Panorama taken with Mastcam-Z Left on sol 406 at 9:30 am LMST. It's a pleasure to zoom in to dive into the wealth of details!

Incredible panorama, Mastcam-Z really is a wonderful instrument. I encourage everyone to download the high resolution version and zoom around. There's way too much interesting stuff here for me to bother annotating (I think an entire PhD thesis could be written using this panorama alone) however I found a couple of interesting things that are at the edges of the panorama, away from the 'main action', that you might not have noticed:

at the far-left of the panorama, on a very distant part of the delta scarp, there's a textbook-tier erosional unconformity. Since the rover is driving in this general direction the image resolution of this feature should improve a lot over the coming weeks.



at the upper right, there's an oblique view of the boulder conglomerate capping unit that the rover was parallel with a few days ago. This along-strike perspective reveals that, like the delta front sandstones below it, the conglomerate deposit is dipping pretty steeply southwards. This strongly suggests that the lake level dropped significantly (perhaps entirely drying out), because the flash flood carrying all these boulders is cascading down the slope of the delta front. It would have been a spectacular and dramatic sight - a waterfall carrying meter-sized boulders. Jezero Crater was home to some violent floods far more powerful than anything we've ever seen at Gale Crater.