[X] My Assistant

[Stu]

I know we've had rather light-hearted discussions about this before, with most people agreeing that Oppy is likely to end her days inside or on the edge of Victoria Crater, simply because there's nothing else to investigate within reach, but has Steve S got it in his mind that Oppy will head off somewhere else after Victoria? This report could be read in a way that suggests that...

[djellison]

I gotta say - those second two craters look damn interesting - and heading NE you get the feeling from the imagery that we'll be on Endurance terrain rather than Erebus terrain once you're at the Ellipse line heading ENE again.

And Ustrax - that's not the case you've been making - you've been saying Ithaca Ithaca Ithaca Ithaca. Not 'lets go to targets in the East and maybe, eventually, we might get to Ithaca'. Go and look carefully at the bottom of the HiRISE image for Victoria ( the larger one that also includes Endurnace ). It's something of a contrast to big 30k wide HRSC images with dotted lines on them

Doug

[dvandorn]

I gotta say - those second two craters look damn interesting - and heading NE you get the feeling from the imagery that we'll be on Endurance terrain rather than Erebus terrain once you're at the Ellipse line heading ENE again.

Don't they? I am *especially* interested in the one I designated C -- its basic form is that of a dimple, rather than a bowl. The light floor unit *might* be some simple dust fill, but as it is surrounded by a "crater" wall that appears convex rather than concave, I have a hard time believing that this is an impact structure, and if it's a sinkhole, the floor might represent a *much* lower evaporite unit than we've seen before. The dark source of the small dark fan *might* just be a dust trap that occasionally yields part of its trove back up to the winds -- but it might also be a piece of a darker, different type of material that's eroding into dark dust.

Yes, Ithaca's ringwall remnants could be quite interesting -- but what are the odds that Ithaca was emplaced a *long* time before this part of Mars was repeatedly flooded, and has been altered so much that you'd have to spend a decade putting together it's story? Ithaca *might* give you some insight into what existed here before there was water -- the three craters I'm looking at, it seems to me, might offer a better chance at increasing our insight into what this part of Mars was like *while* there was water here.

Is it just me, or does it seem like that would be perhaps a little more useful?

-the other Doug