MSL - Stopover on the Road to Glenelg - Arm Commissioning, Commissioning Activity Period 2 - Sols 30 through 37 Options

[fredk]

Hello there!

[Cargo Cult]

There's a self-portrait taken with MAHLI up - just the camera mast, and upside-down and with the dust-covered lens-cover on, but it's most definitely a curious robot peering at itself.

(Quick flipped and colour-stretched version...)

Edit: fredk beat me to it. Still, it's a Martian robot!

[fredk]

I do believe she winked at me...

[CosmicRocker]

Hello there! ...

It's clearly a smarter robot. It recognizes itself.

[Guest_Oersted_*]

My take... Yup, contrast-stretching etc. means that lomography has come to Mars!

[gpurcell]

My take switching into LAB space:

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[MarsInMyLifetime]

The original looked similar to issues with 40-year old color film I have successfully developed and recovered images from, so I used the same techniques: white balanced the most offensive color (the blue component), used a moderate stretch leaving the impression that we ARE looking through a dusty lens, applied a 3-pixel dust filter, resized smaller before sharpening (more apparent sharpness at that scale), and used a painting restorer's trick of using complementary flat colors to fill voids. I know we'll have a better image as soon as the dust cover is opened, but this left me feeling more like I was there--with dusty sunglasses.


(edit: re-associated the upload)

[Doc]

I do believe she winked at me...

Why would they need the LEDs in this case?

[Doc]

Big crystals do have to form at depth, but you can have rocks with crystals that formed at depth but then the crystals were entrained in a liquid magma that reached the surface & cooled rapidly. (Look up "porphyritic")

Interesting... thanks for the education Emily.

[Juramike]

Crystal size is a direct result of how fast the rock "solution" cooled. (In reality, it is more of a partial melt - I like the term "crystal mush").

Crystallization is all about competition. If you have a bunch of plagioclase molecular structures trying to crystallize out quickly you'll get a whole bunch of nucleation points all over the place. They compete with each other so that each nucleation site is trying to grab and assemble ions in the presence of a close neighbor. Lotsa competition, so the crystals stay really, really small. Many of them, but tiny.

If you have the same plag-containing mush but cool it very slowly, then you get only a few nucleation points. The ions in solution can leisurely find their way to the nucleation point and they have the time to be able to build up a big honkin' crystal. Only a few nucleation points, but really big crystals.

(For classifying grain sizes, it can be a sliding scale. During field work this summer we were using the term "granular groundmass dacite" for some of the teeny, but still evident, crystals under a 7x loupe. The official terms are dacite - no xtals present, and granodiorite - visible xtals present. All of these have the same composition range, it is just about crystal size, which is about crystalization speed, which is usually about depth.)

[[Really fun home experiment - make ice cream using liquid nitrogen. From what I've heard the smaller ice crystal size due to the uber-rapid cooling makes it totally dreamy.]]

[Juramike]

Liquid nitrogen ice cream recipe here
http://chemistry.about.com/od/demonstratio.../n2icecream.htm

[mcaplinger]

Why would they need the LEDs in this case?

To verify they were working. It also gives us some data on the dust loading on the cover.

[Ant103]

This self-portrait pic, it's an amazing shot ! I hope that they will do one other, with the MAHLI lens dust cover removed.

My take.

[mcaplinger]

This self-portrait pic, it's an amazing shot !

Thanks. Note on terminology: this isn't what we call the self-portrait. That's a multi-image mosaic of the whole rover taken with MAHLI, still in the planning process.

This image is usually nicknamed for a Pixar character that visually looked something like the RSM.

[markril]

And, another:



Mark