Traverse to the Delta, sols 379-414, 15 Mar 2022- 21 Apr 2022 Options

[marsbug]

Sol 386 Navcam panoramic. A special one because THEY TOOK THE SKY, again...

Stunning, thank you for sharing!

[tau]

Sol 382 Mastcam-Z filters 1 to 6 multispectral principal components false-color panorama

[Ant103]

Sol 389 Navcam panoramic. We roving close to a little unnamed crater.

[Toma B]

Is there a reason for this pause in releasing raw images from Mars2020 that I am unaware of? The last raw image was from sol 389 and now it's sol 394. Is there some software update going on or what? I even tried to look on social media sites and there is not a single word about it.
I can still remember MER Spirit and its LOS in the first few sols on Mars, and I hope it is nothing like that this time?

[Phil Stooke]

No public information at the moment. Sol 394 images just came down.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

And here is the panorama for sol 394 in circular form.

Phil

[MarkL]

[quote name='Phil Stooke' date='Mar 30 2022, 11:35 PM' post='256699']
And here is the panorama for sol 394 in circular form.

Phil


Phil thanks as always for the amazing work you do for us all.

What is a good way to view these circular pans? Do you use viewing software that rotates the image through 360 degrees?

Mark

[tau]

Sol 385 Mastcam-Z
What could that bright thing on La Orotava crater wall be?
A piece of hardware lost or dropped during descent and landing?
A piece of Martian rock that was hurled here from elsewhere by a meteorite impact?
A meteorite? It doesn't look like a meteorite.

[Sean]

Some enhanced / extended sky shots from the MZL_00388 panorama...

[HSchirmer]

A piece of hardware lost or dropped during descent and landing?

Nope. Too big.

A meteorite?

Nope. Shape and how it seems to 'fit' against a back rock suggests in situ.

A piece of Martian rock that was hurled here from elsewhere by a meteorite impact?

Eh, perhaps, but as above, based on what appears to be a 'fit' to the rock behind, it would have to be hurled, buried, then excavated.

What could that bright thing on La Orotava crater wall be?

My initial guess would be a pegmatite pipe.
When molten rock cools, the result is much like leaving a soda or beer in the freezer too long, aka "apple jack" (early distillers let hard cider freeze out the water, then poured out the concentrated liquor)*

When molten rock chambers cool, they 'freeze out' minerals which snow down, until you're left with a magma enriched in the material with the lowest freezing point- which is usually enriched in metals, often white, and called "pegmatite".

*disclaimer- don't try at home. Freeze distillation doesn't separate methanol (bad-go blind) from ethanol (good, you've made apple brandy/schnapps). To separate methanol from ethanol, you need heat distillation and condensation (e.g. a moonshine still)

[stevesliva]

When molten rock chambers cool, they 'freeze out' minerals which snow down,

We recently got a cider press, but tis the season for: the mineral "sand" aka niter that precipitates from cooling maple syrup. (We pulled our 10 taps after getting about 120gallons of sap.) Cider is a fall thing.

You can watch it snow niter, but I think you're seeing sugar on a tiny bit of unspecified "mineral." I'm not sure.

[tau]

Sol 385 Mastcam-Z right eye filter 0 (RGB), principal components false colors
Landscape with rock garden on the crater wall of La Orotava
The false-color bluish gray of the rocks varies a bit: in vesicular rocks it tends towards violet, in layered rocks towards turquoise.

[serpens]

Sol 385 Mastcam-Z
What could that bright thing on La Orotava crater wall be?
A piece of Martian rock that was hurled here from elsewhere by a meteorite impact?

Ejecta yes, but being situated on the crater wall probably home grown. With Séítah seemingly the remnant of a lava lake or magma chamber, fractional crystallization would have resulted in layering of olivine, plagioclase feldspar etc and the impact may have breached that level. One thing about the crater. Did it impact the boundary of Séítah before the crater floor was covered by lava, embaying the crater wall or after? Given that the Séítah side seems much more eroded I would punt for after.

[Phil Stooke]

Here is the sol 395 panorama in circular form. Up on top of a little ridge.

Mark, I don't have special viewing software. The images are made and viewed in Photoshop. I use these images to compare with a HiRISE image to find locations or identify features> So I just view it as a flat image and compare it with another flat image. I suppose there might be other ways to view this but I'm not clever enough to do that.

Phil

[Bill Harris]

My take is that it is a piece of ejecta from the fabled Whiterock Formation.

--Bill