First drill stop: John Klein in Yellowknife Bay, Site 6, Sol 166-271, January 23-May 12, 2013 Options

[dvandorn]

I found another example of two apparent clasts or concretions on a little pedestal, just below where Little Italy is located, so I think we're looking at some process that left little pedestals.





-the other Doug

[Greenish]

Sol 171 ML pair of filter images stitched. Facing WSW.


(I think it's L642 but they didn't use all filters so 6 could be 5; 4 might be 3)

[Actionman]

I'm thinking the wheels of Curiosity must have been in the area rolled over this thin rock and flipped it on edge.

This Sol 173 photo show Curiosity's wheel tracks 0173MR0926000000E1

[Hungry4info]

Looks like we've got our first drilling done.
Pre-contact: Image
Post-dril: Image

A scattering of sand appears in the second image and seems to have been displaced by wind toward the rover.

[CosmicRocker]

Shiny prong ...

Good catch.

That's really interesting.

[elakdawalla]

You know, there is a lot of stuff moving between those two frames. And there are several cracks that seem to darken, which means either whole blocks of rock are shifting or there's dust that is descending into void spaces, maybe? It also seems to me that the left prong (but not the right) has sunk slightly, as though the rock underneath it is fragmenting under the preload force. It's all very puzzling.

Here's a blink gif, cropped to the places where I see the most change, and enlarged 300% by a nearest neighbor method so as not to mess with individual pixel values.

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[djellison]

Percussion on a rock could trigger such motion. I believe the first drill use is percussion only. Later a small drill - followed by a large drill.

[PaulH51]

You know, there is a lot of stuff moving between those two frames. And there are several cracks that seem to darken, which means either whole blocks of rock are shifting or there's dust that is descending into void spaces

Confirmed, Sol 174 Mastcam image show some fragmentation of the bedrock at that test site, we can also see that the witness mark left by the percussion test of the drill tip on the surface. I suspect that this particular rock will not be selected for deep drilling as the sleeve on the drill that collects the tailings could jam the drill if the rock was to move during drilling.

Link to Sol 174 MastCam image

Paul

[jmknapp]

A white-balanced version:

[Airbag]

There is a second ML image, making a mini-pano of that same scene to provide some more context:


Airbag

[fredk]

either whole blocks of rock are shifting or there's dust that is descending into void spaces, maybe? ... It's all very puzzling.

We've seen many times flat, platey rocks shift around when we drive on them, even with the much lighter MERs, so that wouldn't be too surprizing. But also the vibration might simply be settling sand/dust deeper into cracks, as you say.

Edit: The fact we're seeing little pebbles shifting quite far away from the drill contact indicates that the vibration is propagating at least that far. That suggests to me that the slab under the drill isn't loosely sitting on sand, but part of a larger piece of rock. So I vote for the settling sand idea. If we had MC before the operation that might confirm negligible displacement of the rocks.

[fredk]

There's a corresponding M-34 that hasn't been downlinked yet, but no other good images of it yet that I can see.

Maybe the old standby navcams can tell us something while we wait for MC34. Here's a flicker gif of the "shiny prong" from the sol 168 L/R pair, stretched and zoomed 4x (ugh; it's only the fact that we get stereo info that justifies such a zoom):

The prong is at dead centre. It looks pretty clear that the dark "stalk" below the shiny part is standing upright, rather than a hollow in the rock, as some have suggested. But the resolution isn't quite there to distinguish the shiny part with certainty.

I'm going to stick with my original interpretation, though I won't be shocked if I'm wrong...

[serpens]

Being MER indoctrinated I'm a bit dimensions challenged with respect to Curiosity's images. Just how large is the inverted Italy feature?

[Greenish]

Rough guess is about 3-4cm tall? Estimating about 8-10m away (which is hard because it's off of Phil's highest-res maps). MC100 pixel resolution is .074 mrad/pix, and it's ~50 px high.

I tried using an estimated declination angle but that came out closer to 30m, which I'm sure is too far looking at the HiRise images. It makes sense that it's closer due to rising terrain in that direction.

[mhoward]

Some MAHLI images from sol 176 are down. It looks very much like there are two percussion sites, unless I'm really missing something.

Edit: Looks like the second drilling took place today on sol 176; there are before and after MAHLI images.