MSL "Drive, drive, drive" toward Glenelg, The scientists (mostly) get the keys - sols 38-56 Options

[JRA]

Stunning photos everyone. The Sol45 MastCam100 w/ extended sky is really cool. Speaking simply as a layman, the area to the left looks extremely interesting (North-west side of Mt. Sharp I think?)

And thanks for the new desktop background Ant103. (the first of the two postcards).

[serpens]

People were trying to read too much into the composition.... With only a single rock that is not in place, it's way too early to say anything beyond the fact that it has a so far unique composition.

Amen.

[Gladstoner]

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[jmknapp]

Wow, fascinating analogues there, Gladstoner.

I was hiking around last weekend at a local wetland park, although with this very dry year the place has been mostly dry from midsummer on. There've been some rains recently and one pond at least had a small amount of water. I took this cell phone pic of some submerged mud cracks:



Apparently, mud cracks can be stable under water. This soil I expect has a large clay content. Maybe if such cracks later filled with sand/dust or the like during a dry interval they would be preserved.

For a random reference (from 1907!) see: http://books.google.com/books?id=a5NOAAAAI...p;q&f=false

Mudcracks may... be regarded as a distinguishing feature, by means of which it may be determined whether formations are fluviatile, lacustrine, estuarine, aeolian, or pertaining to the shallow open sea. In order that mud cracks may be formed, the deposit should originate under very quiet waters, either removed by evaporation or slowly drained away with bottom velocities of less than one-third of a mile an hour. Factors governing the nature of the mud-cracks are the shrinkage nature of the deposit, its porosity, length of period of dessication, temperature of the air. A mud-cracked loam does not easily preserve its detailed surface, except when remaining moist, so that little swelling takes place. A pure clay, slowly subsiding from quiet waters, and wet sufficiently long to become compact upon drying, would retain its mud-cracks upon rewetting either by rain or flood waters. Sandy wash filling the cracks of the previous clay layer would give a permanent record of the mud-cracks.

The review article goes on to discuss arid playa lakes, etc and is quite informative in this context. The referenced article is actually available online at archive.org (p. 430). God, I love the internet (and archive.org).

[ronald]

Nice one from sol 53 - right image came down with "some" lag

[EdTruthan]

Sol 51 - Late Morning Anaglyph
Some long-awaited frames needed to complete the lower tier of the 90 frame MC100 Sol 51 panorama recently arrived, though one stinkin' frame from the lower left hand corner is still AWOL, but since there's not a whole lot going on down there I thought I'd go ahead and knock this out. Since the entire pan was also covered by a full MC34 pairing it just begged for anaglyphing. It's a vertically expanded and better refined version of the previous pano from this post, this time with much more foreground detail. All the MC100 dirt spots have been removed & lateral alignments carefully tweaked in various areas making it a super smooth, 165 degree - 41,414 x 2038 pixel - late morning ride across the landscape...

Click the thumbnail for the Half Sized Version (20712x1020px):


And here's the Full Version -> -> -> Sol51-MC34-and-MC100-Late-Morning-Panorama-Anaglyph.jpg ~ If your browser chokes on the size (mine all do) right click the link and do a "Save As..." & open the downloaded file in your preferred image viewer.

[Zelenyikot]

It is amazing!
Thank you!

I am ready at any moment to repeat the words of my signature.

[vikingmars]

Sol 50 images were all down this WE. Here is a small segment of the panorama as a "poster"...
(smaller size due to today's problem in uploading images more than 400ko in the Forum : I was told that they are working on it...).
Anyway, enjoy !

[Ron Hobbs]

WOW!!!

Thank you for such a beautiful view.

[Ant103]

Rocknest mosaic on Sol 56 (Mastcam34) :

[elakdawalla]

During yesterday's science sessions, Vasavada said they'd documented 21 pressure dips indicating dust devils, but detected only one of them in imaging. Did we catch that dust devil in any images yet? The only time information I have is "during the first 100 sols." If you do look and find one, post in the relevant thread

He also showed some really cool Navcam zenith movies; after "stretching the hell out of them" you could see motion that Vasavada attributed to dust in the atmosphere. Those were lovely.

[fredk]

I haven't seen any DD images posted here. Did he say what the images showed? A DD against the sky, or the effects of wind near the rover? Since they were detected locally at the rover by the pressure dips, there could be surface changes due to wind.

There've been lots of navcam monitoring sequences that show the foreground. If you looked at them very carefully or subtracted them from each other you might see changes in the foreground due to wind (or very faint DDs against the sky, of course).

[elakdawalla]

I've inquired, and been told that the dust devil was observed in a horizon survey from sol 41.

[Zelenyikot]

I made animation of 32 shots on 41 sol. But a dust devils I didn't see. Zoomed 150%, frequency of shots 0,2 s (gif - 6 Mb)

[elakdawalla]

Thanks for assembling that. I tried averaging all the frames and subtracting the averaged frame from them all to see if I could bring it out, but I'm not seeing anything but noise.

The good news is, it won't be long at all before we have PDS data to work with. I'm told that data from sols 0-90 should be released in February. Not all investigations are expected to meet that deadline, but I think we can count on the engineering camera data being there.