Second MSL Landing Site Workshop, October 23-25, 2007 Options

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

SECOND LANDING SITE WORKSHOP FOR THE 2009 MARS SCIENCE LABORATORY
October 23-25, 2007
Pasadena, CA

Announcement (MS Word)
Information to Presenters (MS Word)

Note also the two August 2007 updates for MSL Landing Site Selection: User’s Guide to Engineering Constraints.

[Stu]

Couple of colourised-strictly-for-fun-not-suggesting-they're-accurate-or-anything sections of that beautiful Nili Fossae Trough image ustrax, to thank you for your excellent work on this discussion for those of us anable to follow it so closely

[tglotch]

From my perspective, the workshop was a tremendous success. Narrowing more than 50 sites down to six was a sometimes painful process, but it was important for the scientific community to do that work so that the folks at the management level can focus on the most scientifically interesting places. The other option was that we give them a much longer list and the safest (and potentially most boring) place would be chosen because of engineering constraints.

A couple of interesting notes based on some previous comments: Each of the final six sites has exhibited the spectral signature of smectite clays in OMEGA or CRISM data (or both), although Nili Fossae Trough and Mawrth Vallis exhibit the deepest spectral features, which may correlate with abundance.

Holden and Terby came very close to not making the final list. They are both very interesting scientifically, but we were told by the engineers that because of their high southern latitudes and cold temperatures that if MSL landed at one of those sites it would have to lie dormant for the first month or so and then operate at only a 30-50% duty cycle. There was a lot of debate about whether the science that could be done at those sites outweighs those limitations. In the end it was a close vote, but both were kept on the final list.

The SW Meridiani site is very different from the MER B site at Meridiani Planum. It has been interpreted as a paleocrater lake and contains the spectral signature of smectite clays in visible/near-IR data. In addition, the TES and THEMIS data exhibit spectral character consistent with the presence of chloride salts.