[X] My Assistant

[aldo12xu]

A brief discussion on this began on the Route thread after Pando posted an interesting route map. Pando's image is attached to a lower resolution version below that extends the coverage up to Erebus Crater. What caught the eye of a few people were the areas labeled as the "Halfpipe Formation", coloured yellow below. This unit would seem to represent a new statigraphic horizon that overlies the Burns Formation.


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I went back to images of the Payson outcrop from sol 748-50, where the name Halfpipe first appeared. There was mention of a Mogollon Contact. I wonder if the contact could correspond to the rough textured, darker zone running diagonally in the central part of this photo. It seems similar to the Whatanga Contact between the Middle and Upper units of the Burns Formation. The Whatanga contact is interpreted to be a zone of recrystallization created above the water table.

And I don't know if this was mentioned before, but there seems to be a lot of evidence for cross-bedding (festoon geometry?) and possible soft-sediment deformation at Payson lying below the possible contact. Could this be the equivalent of the Burns Upper Unit?

The other location where the Halfpipe Formation was observed was on sol 818 at our "Sinkhole Crater".

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...VMP2410L5M1.JPG

But what about the other Halfpipe location on Pando's image, off the route map to the east? On what basis would NASA have those outcrops to be similar to those at Sinkhole and Payson?

[CosmicRocker]

Thanks for your replies, guys. I was concerned I would be slapped down on both thoughts.

I can't help but speculate further after seeing the sol 912 L7s that came down of Espanola. No time for a pretty poster tonight, just a very quick and dirty side-by-side. The image from near Erebus on sol 712 is one of the rare L1s with the wide bandpass, so it was hard to know which 912 image to compare it to, but it probably doesn't matter that much. I had been expecting the basement of Victoria's apron to be more of a jumble of lithologies, but it looks pretty similar to the basement we've been driving over for a long time. It's time to sleep on it.