The major science stories from Spirit Options

[elakdawalla]

I really, really, really tried to do my own research this time without relying on all you rover-watchers here for help, but after a couple of weeks of banging my head against a wall I'm coming crawling to you for help. I need to produce (for both our website and a podcast) a simplified, big-picture view of what Spirit has accomplished on Mars over the past five years. I've basically got to summarize five years of the mission in four minutes of speaking. The operational details (the main mileposts on the drive) are very easy to figure out with the help of Tesheiner's maps and the discussions in the route map thread, so I've got that in hand. What I am having trouble with is figuring out the answers to the following science questions:

1. What is the summary story that can be told about the history of the interior of Gusev crater based on Spirit's observations? Geology is fundamentally a science devoted to telling a story about a landscape -- what's the basic story that the Gusev landscape is telling us, as revealed by Spirit?

2. What are the biggest science discoveries -- I'm talking about the top three or five stories -- that Spirit has made?

There's just so much material on Spirit that I'm having an awful time trying to see the forest for all the trees. All the journal articles that I can find are just devoted to one phase of the mission, so I can't figure out which stories are the most significant. I have all of Salley's great articles to go through, but again, they're so detail-rich that it's difficult to figure out what the big picture is; it's like looking at a Seurat painting up close.

Any help or pointers to any place where anybody has already produced some quality science summary would be greatly appreciated.

--Emily

[marsophile]

Anyone wear a Spirit costume for Halloween?

[Hungry4info]

!

[Phil Stooke]

This isn't really the best thread for this post, but I'm not sure it needs a new thread now.

I am finishing up work on my Mars Atlas vol. 1 (up to Mars Express) and looking ahead at Vol. 2 (MER to present). All the text is done in draft form, so it's illustrations I am looking at. This is an experimental version of a map of early Spirit operations. The whole route would be mapped at larger scale (lower resolution) but sites of interest will be covered like this.

Placenames are a problem. They were for Phoenix as well. Supposedly, they are accessible via the Analyst's Notebook at PDS, but that is filled with inconsistencies, with uncertainty regarding the identity of the named feature, etc. And looking ahead, I see that later in the mission most names are omitted from the Analyst's notebook.

(Mission Ops people! Do us a favor, please keep and make available a proper record of the names you assign!)

Phil

[MoreInput]

I am finishing up work on my Mars Atlas vol. 1 (up to Mars Express) and looking ahead at Vol. 2 (MER to present). All the text is done in draft form, so it's illustrations I am looking at. This is an experimental version of a map of early Spirit operations. The whole route would be mapped at larger scale (lower resolution) but sites of interest will be covered like this.

Wonderfull news. I really like maps, and I really like this mission. Is there any release date of this Mars atlas?

Placenames are a problem. They were for Phoenix as well. Supposedly, they are accessible via the Analyst's Notebook at PDS, but that is filled with inconsistencies, with uncertainty regarding the identity of the named feature, etc. And looking ahead, I see that later in the mission most names are omitted from the Analyst's notebook.

Yes, I tried to make a list of the analyzed objects for Wikipedia. A full list of analyzed object would be useless, and which object would be really relevant to know about? So I gave up this list.

[Phil Stooke]

I will submit it to the publisher at the end of this year for release late next year.

Phil


http://publish.uwo.ca/~pjstooke/marsatlas.htm

[elakdawalla]

Placenames are a problem...

I'm curious how you're going about trying to figure out place names, in the absence of good historical records, because periodically I have to try to go back and figure out what something was called (or, more commonly, do the reverse action, finding an image of a place knowing only its name). I would usually begin by looking at the Pancam database to see if there was a targeted observation of the place of interest, at the rover updates on the mission website to see if it was mentioned in there, and at Salley's stories. Where else can you locate this information? Also, on MER there's a distinction between named locations and objects, and the names for the specific spots at those locations or objects where in-situ observations were made -- I hope you're not trying to track down all the names for those?

This information is surely in some JPL database somewhere. I'd guess that if you had a specific set of things that were stumping you, a rover driver might be able to dig around and answer your questions, but that list could get kind of long for a 7-year mission....

[Phil Stooke]

Here are the Analysts' notebooks:

http://an.rsl.wustl.edu/mer/

And here are the site maps:

http://an.rsl.wustl.edu/mer/merbrowser/bro...=map&m=MERA

Select a site, play with the map dimensions, and you get a map of named features.

You're right, I don't want every name, and I am mainly looking for names of objects like a rock or hollow, not a remote-sensing or IDD target. But it's not always easy to tell which object a name refers to.

Phil

[Marz]

Evidence for a Noachian-aged ephemeral lake in Gusev crater, Mars

summary: alteration of Comanche is consistent with low-temperature evaporites from near-surface water-rock solutions and equivalent to nearby Algonquin outcrops.

http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/42/4/359.abstract

[MoreInput]

Evidence for a Noachian-aged ephemeral lake in Gusev crater, Mars

Here the paper from lpsc of 2014: http://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2014/pdf/1739.pdf

[xflare]

Just wondering here , but if mission planners had Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter - HiRISE and CRISM data in particular available to them when they were selecting a landing site for Spirit, do you think they would have selected a different site to Gusev Crater?

[djellison]

That's a virtually unplayable and pointless game of what-if. The majority of the MER landing site selection process was driven by engineering anyway.