Journey to Mt Sharp - Part 5: Into the Valleys, Sol 706-752, Aug 1-Sep 17, 2014 Options

[jmknapp]

Very nice topo map, Joe - I added the HiRISE to it here:

That should cover the territory for quite a while, assuming they find something good to look at and sample in the Pahrump Hills. Based on the planned path shown in the telecon graphic, it will go something like this:



What exactly is the Pahrump Hills target area for sampling? On the approach I've been looking at the whitish area in the recent images, but that seems like pretty low-lying ground. Is it material that has come down from the Pahrump hills further south?

[djellison]

And yesterdays MastCam view of the hills is actually a 360 now. Here's my favorite part of it...

http://dougellison.smugmug.com/Landscapes/...ity/i-Nh6kjjv/A

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[elakdawalla]

Likely in situ work at Pahrump Hills deserves a new thread!

[fredk]

Fin and ball:

I'd love to hear ideas for such an apparently nicely spherical ball (some kind of concretion?) - this appears to be much larger than Meridiani's blueberries...

We're too far away from any EDL debris, aren't we?

[ngunn]

Probably a coincidence, but near the bottom almost below the 'fin' there's what looks like part of a circular socket pretty much the right size to have contained that ball.

[Floyd]

It's the variety of Croquet played with fins rather than pegs. The ball is just short. Keep an eye out for mallets. Isaac Spratt is more widely traveled than I supposed.

[fredk]

Fooled by M100 - measuring the distance from parallax in the navcam frames:

I find the ball to be roughly 3.2 metres from the cameras. For M100 that gives a diameter of about 1.2 cm. Not huge, but still bigger than your typical blueberry. Also remarkably spherical.

It's too bad we're far from the spot now so can't get closer or look with chemcam.

[algorithm]

It looks to me as though our little spherical friend may have spent some time in the little trough just below it, prior to moving on.



Reminds me of a WW2 naval mine that has been 'de-pronged'

[eoincampbell]

Another similar looking, partially buried sphere ... I hope Curiosity can conker this mystery...

[ngunn]

OK there are no obvious large spheres there. Do you mean the pebble at 0.4 right and 0.35 up? I think it's absolutely right to search the area for more examples, but that one doesn't look very spherical to me. As to where fredk's one comes from I don't find algorithm's suggestion of the groove below very convincing. The socket off to the left I mentioned earlier looks better, but in all likelihood this sphere, like the Meridiani blueberries, has long outlasted the surface it came from.

[serpens]

There seem to be a couple of concretionary like examples and the question is, what are they made of. If Pahrump hills are indeed heavy on the silicon as was Bonanza King then Jmknapp may soon be taking a bow for suggesting the presence of chert.

[jmknapp]

I was just replying to a suggestion by Mr. Natural:

I wonder if the rock was a hydrated silica or something like a chert, either of which would be very interesting.

My question was whether the drill can get through something like chert. Not too good personally on geology, but the chert around my locale is pretty much like flint (conchoidal fractures).

[Gerald]

I'd love to hear ideas for such an apparently nicely spherical ball ...

An impact-related tektite or lapillus as the usual candidates.

[atomoid]

nice find! heres a stereo view of that sol746 spherule. seems it was just out of view sol744. it seems odd to see a lone pristine specimen, but no ubiquity, only this or crocodile eyebrows

[fredk]

Bright fleck near the sphere:


Elsewhere, it's unusual to see this much hue variation in one image:

Some of that may be due to dust in the distance, but there are clearly real variations there.