Exploring Mt Sharp north of the dunes - Part 1: Beyond Pahrump Hills, Site 45-50, Sol 923-1147, March 12-October 28, 2015 Options

[jvandriel]

The Navcam L view on Sol 926.

Jan van Driel.

[Phil Stooke]

What amazing veins. I'm irresistibly drawn to the old description of the discovery of gold in the Klondike:

"gold lying thick between flaky slabs of rock like cheese in a sandwich"

Phil (reporting from LPSC)

[tanjent]

Don't underestimate the PR value of a gold discovery...

[xflare]

We may be here a while wow

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[Explorer1]

Wow indeed; that's paydirt (if we're still talking in terms of gold)!

[djellison]

Extraordinary stuff!

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[atomoid]

must be trying to steal the limelight from Oppy.. sol926 anaglyph .. what happened here?

[atomoid]

so much going on here, had to revisit the area to the left of above.. and portion in xeye form

[MarsInMyLifetime]

Visible on the lower right of that last anaglyph rendering is a dimensional "bubble" of sorts that certainly has a hollowed aspect to it. And those boxy segments remind me of overhead views of Pueblo Bonito in New Mexico (http://arch.ced.berkeley.edu/kap/gallery/gal151.html). All around, this is an amazing place to be. And this is an amazing time to be witnessing all these outstanding and previously unseen views of so many distant worlds.

[nprev]

Absolutely spectacular, surely to be one of the highlights of the entire mission.

Speaking as a COMPLETE amateur, this looks to me like extraordinarily powerful evidence of hydrothermal activity; finding silica would presumably clinch that interpretation.

[eliBonora]

Our mosaic and anaglyph of this amazing angle!





and sol 926 mosaic:

[Gerald]

... this looks to me like extraordinarily powerful evidence of hydrothermal activity; finding silica would presumably clinch that interpretation.

I wonder, whether the dark phase of the veins are (enriched in) hematite or other ores, and whether there may be a connection to Hematite Ridge, interpreting the veins as clastic dikes filling fractures with liquids of a later epoch, and precipitating minerals.
May be resolved later with data from younger layers.
Short-term I'm hoping for - almost expecting - interesting elemental enrichments in the veins, and possible detection of new types of minerals (for Mars).
Although I'm unsure, whether a new drilling will be approved so shortly after the previous drilling.

[jvandriel]

The Mastcam R view on Sol 924.

Jan van Driel

[PaulH51]

My take on the MastCam-R view of Garden City on Sol 924 (Raw)

LINK on Flickr

[dvandorn]

Interesting -- y'all remember those things Curiosity came across early on, that looked like popped mud bubbles that had frozen into stone?

Looks to me like this formation shows one of those bubbles as an erosional remnant in the uppermost layers of what has most effectively resisted erosion, circled in red in the attached detail.

I also see a lot of other little circular-to-spherical features in the remnant formation, here. Some might be the remains of small impacts, but others might well be the final remains of other of these "popped bubble" formations.

-the other Doug