Exploring Mt Sharp north of the dunes - Part 2: Beyond Big Sky, Site 50-51, sol 1148-1171, October 29, 2015-November 23, 2015 Options

[Phil Stooke]

A drive on sol 1148 - looks like we are near the southern bend of Cut Bank Valley. This perspective view of a hazcam image is the only visual cue I have so far of its location. It looks along the west-running branch of the valley and its southern side.

Phil

[PaulH51]

There will be a one-week suspension of MRO’s communication relay duty. Curiosity will use a different orbiter for relaying its data to Earth while MRO is out of service. Full details: Rewrite of Onboard Memory Planned for NASA Mars Orbiter

[jvandriel]

The Navcam L panoramic view on Sol 1148.

Jan van Driel

[Phil Stooke]

Great pan, thanks! Here is a circular reprojection of it - you can see how we are looking along the valley now. The path ahead looks a bit smoother.

Phil

[nogal]

This is such a dificult terrain to be driving on (just see the 3D route map in Emily's blog) I can't resist adding a short map here.
Using Jan's excelent pan, Phil's reprojection, and after a lot of visual comparisons, here is where I think MSL is. A bit SSE of the location indicated by Phil.
Fernando

[Herobrine]

NAVCAM travel animation for Sol 1148 is 45 frames.
Here's a small preview of the left NAVCAM's view:

And here is the full-size (512x256) stereo pair animation for Parallel and Cross-Eye viewing. File sizes are 7 MiB each.

[PaulH51]

Mission Update from Ryan Anderson: Sols 1148-1152: Driving and Contact Science. LINK

Apologies for the lack of an update on Wednesday this week! Lauren and I were both in a training class, and Ken was traveling so none of us were able to post here. That means that today’s post covers five sols of planning!
The sol 1148 plan started off with a Mastcam observation of the target McLeod and a 10x1 mosaic to patch a gap in the mosaic from sol 1144. After that, we drove for 32 meters, followed by standard post-drive imaging. On Sol 1149, ChemCam did a bunch of calibration observations and Navcam and Mastcam did some standard atmospheric observations.
The drive on Sol 1148 put us in range of some interesting rocks, and the Sol 1150-1152 plan is focusing on analyzing our new surroundings. On Sol 1150, Mastcam has an 8x4 mosaic of some interesting layered rocks, followed by ChemCam and Mastcam observations of the targets “Dunkirk” and “Duperow”. After the remote sensing is done, there are three APXS observations of the targets “Exshaw”, “Ellis Canyon”, and “Ennis”.
On Sol 1151, Mastcam has an 18x2 mosaic of the “Carlile” area and a 9x2 mosaic of the “East Glacier” target. This is followed by ChemCam observations of Ennis and Exshaw and the accompanying Mastcam documentation images. In the afternoon on Sol 1151, there will be a short drive to the southeast which should provide data to allow a longer drive in the next plan. Finally, on Sol 1152, the plan is to do Navcam, Mastcam, and ChemCam atmospheric observations, plus some ChemCam focus tests.

[PaulH51]

Sol 1148 L-MastCam 'drive direction mosaic'

Flickr Original Size 5874 x 1516 pixels LINK
Imgur mirror LINK

[jccwrt]

I stitched together the mosaic of McLeod from Sol 1148. One interesting feature in this outcrop are small white clasts. They almost look like rounded versions of the feldspar lathes that Curiosity has seen in other rocks.



I had to downsize my version to keep it at a manageable size (the original stitch was something like 60mb), so a lot of smaller detail got lost. Here's a link to one of the full-res subframes that illustrates those "pebbles" nicely.


And a couple of NavCam postcards. Been a while since I've found a good set of NavCam images that I thought would make good postcards.

Sol 1144


Sol 1148

[PaulH51]

Lovely Lamination's: Sol 1148 L-MastCam. Roughly assembled with MS ICE, stretched contrast and sharpened to highlight the laminations...

Flickr Original Size 3912 x 2560 pixels LINK
Imgur mirror LINK

[elakdawalla]

I stitched together the mosaic of McLeod from Sol 1148. One interesting feature in this outcrop are small white clasts. They almost look like rounded versions of the feldspar lathes that Curiosity has seen in other rocks.

Those white things are interesting. They're just at the limit of what you can see in the JPEG compression so I'm not sure about a "rounded" shape (though I guess at least I agree with you that they're not lath-shaped, more equant). They are very white! Well spotted.

[jccwrt]

I think this MAHLI shot from Sol 1150 was taken of the same unit, although not in the same location. Some of those clasts even look like they've got an oolitc texture!

[elakdawalla]

Some of them seem to have darker colored centers?

[jccwrt]

Yeah. At first glance they look a lot like ooids to me (and you probably know this Emily, but for the non-geologists out there) it's where a clast rolls around on the seafloor or lakebed and collects a nice smooth mineral coating, sort of like a jawbreaker. On Earth that mineral is almost always calcium carbonate, which seems a bit weird for Gale Crater and is making me feel like I'm shooting from the hip with this interpretation.

Oolitic limestones are pretty common where I live, so I'm inclined to see them everywhere. Most of the time they're packed together, but sometimes in lime mudstones (which these obviously aren't) you'll occasionally see a stray ooid or two. In this case I think reworking would be more likely for them to end up in this kind of rock. So if they are ooids, that kind of begs the question about the environment they formed in.

[fredk]

Lovely view on 1151. Anaglyph:


And cross-eyed: