[X] My Assistant

[PaulH51]

Midnight Planets has reported Curiosity's movement of ~46.3m WSW (-116º) on Sol 1353.
Only 7 L-NavCams were available for this rough & ready stitch in MS ICE, the raws are a little overexposed, but they may assist in pinpointing the location.
I cropped the stitch a little to get it under the upload limit.
I'll post the full resolution 360 on an image host as the images become available, unless someone beats me to it

[James Sorenson]

I like the "UV darkening of the adhesive" theory. The trouble that I'm having though with it possibly being adhesive is it appears to take an exact imprint of the pattern like the pattern was intricately cutout then bonded which would support what we are seeing but that seems a little unlikely. I would have thought the pattern would be printed on some sort of backing surface with then a uniform adhesive on the back, which is not what we are seeing if that was the case. Need more information on these particular fidicual targets, how they were made and applied, and why they were removed. Though the latter isn't as important to know.

[mcaplinger]

I would have thought the pattern would be printed on some sort of backing surface with then a uniform adhesive on the back...

If you look at the original M34 raw images taken in the system thermal test (sorry, can't share), you can see that the background color is identical to the cover's, so there is no backing surface as far as I can tell at the resolution of the image. It looks like a cut decal, very conformal to the cover.

I don't know more about the story of this target, but I have some inquiries in.

[EDIT]
Ah, the full story. The covers were originally black-anodized but were found to be flaking ( http://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/8403 .) Seems like the original white target got stripped off when the covers were reanodized but there was some residual etching and that's what you're seeing.