Methuselah Options

[djellison]

Look at the MI campaign on this puppy It's got to be a 4 x 4 frame MI mosaic

http://qt.exploratorium.edu:16080/mars/spi...cam/2005-04-28/

Doug

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

http://planetary.org/news/2005/mer-udpate_0428.html

Spirit then drove toward a piece of outcrop in the neighborhood that attracted the eye of science team, and spent last weekend and this week checking out the target the team has dubbed Methuselah. Several meters across, this section of bedrock presently forms a semi-circular boundary around the rover.

"Basically, the idea there was to cover the whole thing at a very high-resolution and then find the very best spot to move in and do some detail work with the IDD and that's what we're doing right now," Squyres told The Planetary Society.

The rover moved in on the spot the science team chose and nicknamed Keystone earlier this week and will be hunkered down there throughout this coming weekend. Currently, Spirit is in the process of taking 144 microscopic imager (MI) pictures for a "huge mosaic," as Squyres described it. "We planned [to take] two-thirds of those 144 images yesterday and so the rover should start executing that in just a few hours now," he elaborated. "And we're planning the remaining one-third of it today. And then we're going to do RAT brush, APXS, Mössbauer spectrometer, and a complete work over of this thing."

[OWW]

Here is one of those MI images already. Looks like 'Tetl' and 'Pot of Gold':

[chris]

I'm not a geologist, so I could be dead wrong, but some of the shapes in the MI images remind me of the vugs that Opportunity saw in Eagle crater.

Chris

[gpurcell]

Looks like Pot of Gold to me as well.

Hopefully we found some of the outcrop!

[deglr6328]

I feel like some parts of those images are just teasing me to find structure where there is none... Sometimes the mind's adroitness for deciphering patterns in the noise can be almost cruel.

[glennwsmith]

I'd like to add my two cents worth to what Chris has said, namely, that this looks like Meridiani. There are no "blueberries" per se, but perhaps conditions were not quite right on this side of the planet for their formation -- but otherwise it SEEMS like the same strata! And I am certain that the JPL people are going at it with the same thought, hence the massive focus on this piece of real estate. The Mossbauer etc. will tell us more?

Doug, can we cross-reference the "blueberries" thread?

Glenn

[dilo]

Looks like Pot of Gold to me as well.

Hopefully we found some of the outcrop!

I tried to make a mosaic with last mi images (Sol471... not easy and not perfect due to parallax issues ). In the left color Pancam image you can see that this is centered on brush area...

[glennwsmith]

Neato!

[dot.dk]

Moving on to a new target by the looks of it.

The rocker-bogie is really being tested here

[Burmese]

I wonder how this rock picked up that tidy circular impression?

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...I4P2564L7M1.JPG

[dvandorn]

I wonder how this rock picked up that tidy circular impression?

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...I4P2564L7M1.JPG

There's always one good explanation for tidy circular impressions -- craters. In the absence of any other data, I'd guess it's a very small crater from a very small impactor.

I bet the rock is pretty soft or unconsolidated, though, to record a crater so nicely without being blown to bits by such an impact...

-the other Doug

[JRehling]

I wonder how this rock picked up that tidy circular impression?

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...I4P2564L7M1.JPG

There's always one good explanation for tidy circular impressions -- craters. In the absence of any other data, I'd guess it's a very small crater from a very small impactor.

I bet the rock is pretty soft or unconsolidated, though, to record a crater so nicely without being blown to bits by such an impact...

-the other Doug

Any impactor small enough to make a crater that small would certainly have burned up in the martian atmosphere. This is the sort of impact feature that may exist on the Moon, but never Mars.

[djellison]

[Jeff7]

I wonder how this rock picked up that tidy circular impression?

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...I4P2564L7M1.JPG

There's always one good explanation for tidy circular impressions -- craters. In the absence of any other data, I'd guess it's a very small crater from a very small impactor.

I bet the rock is pretty soft or unconsolidated, though, to record a crater so nicely without being blown to bits by such an impact...

-the other Doug

Any impactor small enough to make a crater that small would certainly have burned up in the martian atmosphere. This is the sort of impact feature that may exist on the Moon, but never Mars.

They've found what look like tiny craters at Opportunity's site. Sure, if it's tiny when it enters the atmosphere, the object will disintegrate quickly. But if it's large enough, a small portion of it could make it to the surface.

I place my bet that it's simply a random formation - just like how we see shapes in the clouds, we happened upon a formation that has a round imprint on it.