[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?