Mars does that to you.

I had a similar first impression with deposits of "hematite silt" from Oppy at Burns Cliff. Sometimes the windblown surfaces look quite water-borne.

We live in an aqueous environment and many times, past experience colors our perceptions. Things are not always as they seem.

--Bill

We received some MIs of the broken crust today. I made a small mosaic from them.



I have been wondering about these light patches seen in the pancams of the area. The fine grained, light areas in the MIs are certainly consistent with a major concentration of salts.

Good mosaic.

I've see something like this locally. If a mine has pyritic material in the overburden, this material weathers into iron, sulfate (salts) and acid. This mineralized water saturates loose sand or porous sandstone, evaporates and leaves behind what is called a "sulfate bloom" on the surface.

Of added interest is the bright, overexposed "CCD bleed" in the top row of MI images used in the mosaic. This suggests to me a fresh, reflective crystal face (well, "object"; crystal has a new-age loaded meaning) on the surface.

--Bill

Bill:

I have seen similar things as well in sulfide rich sediments that were exposed to oxidation. I see the similarity.

I also noticed that CCD bleed, but didn't stop to think about it. You could very well be correct. I found another MI of the same area without the flare, but it was somewhat out of focus. There was still an indistinct bright area at that same location. Scanning other images of this stuff, I can see some grains that suggest a cubic or rhombic outline, and one or two of them that have what might be a crystal face that is saturated in luminosity.

It appears as if they have backed away from this site without using any of the other instruments on the arm. I would have liked to have seen more of an investigation, but perhaps they already know what they were looking at.

Here a super resolution outcrop image (sum of 8 PanCam frames from Sol494):

The specular reflection was so unusual on dusty, wind-eroded Mars that it was _very_ noticable. Hopefully, someone in the back room noticed it too and got more MIs.

--Bill

Steve Squyres has a new update today, with a lot of discussion of these rocks.

http://athena1.cornell.edu/news/mubss/

I was actually thinking of posting a message here today arguing for an impact origin of these rocks, but Steve says they favor a volcaniclastic origin. He also has some interesting discussion of the distribution of alteration they have observed. Apparently they have seen some pretty significant alteration, even at the top of the section.

Oh man, would this be a micromounters wet dream or what.. ...........minerals in crystal form from Mars.....oh yah....
so care to guess what mineral it is composed of?

Scott

Oh, yeah. I wouldn't mind having a few of those micromounts...one for my collection, and the others for sale on Ebay.

If that really was a crystal gleaming in the sunlight, I'd hesitate to guess what it was. There are so many possibilities. Small crystals are relatively common in soils and sediments on Earth, and I see no reason the same shouldn't be true on Mars. I'm actually somewhat surprized we haven't seen more examples of this.

I noticed an interesting pancam sequence captured on sols 497-498, and managed to convince Autostitch to combine all 28 images into this panorama.



It's interesting to see the crisscrossing pattern of tracks here, and further down the hill. It gives one a sense of how carefully they are investigating the rocks in this area. Like a good field geologist, Spirit's been all over these outcrops. I had to shrink the original 33 MB image down to 1 MB to post this, but I don't think it lost too much detail.

This is a color stitch from Sol497 (only the left portion of CosmicRocker mosaic...):

Notes: L257 pseudo colors, 50% of original scale, made with autostich.

Thanks, your pans show the first time Spirit's whole path uphill. Sadly we should have a Rover 3D model available on the web in order to fit it into such great pans. That would be concrete.

A 3D model like this would already satisfy: http://www.br-online.de//wissen-bildung/th...lash-rover.html It must be copyable in each position.

This is a simple sketch map of the recent travels of Spirit, superimposed on the best MOC image of the area.

Click to view attachment

Phil

I took the opportunity (no pun) and put the 3d model in the pan

http://img178.echo.cx/my.php?image=sol497p...4gdcopy15ds.jpg
http://img178.echo.cx/my.php?image=sol497p...l4gdcopy3yu.jpg

Great idea

That's exactly what I was hoping for, but never thought that it could...

Hey, it seems you have the right tool for the journey

If you eventually may to put each view on your image host, little by little, I would not say no
But we should consider that this flash has a copyright! How could we manage this?

Thanks, that certainly puts things into perspective...

--Bill

Wonderful!
Good idea from Tman and great application from dot.dk! (I love this Forum ).
Hey guys, this could be the last view from Larry's lookout! (Autostitch of 2 NavCam from Sol503):

A larger version:

Tman/Nirgal, do you think could be a nice starting material for you...?

Could be dilo, could be But it seems to me there is to much traffic for a neat photography of nature

Wow, three different old tracks from Spirit in the sand and we were already there: http://www.greuti.ch/spirit/nav-sol438b.jpg (new version of March 29) It seems Spirit loves this position.

Spirit again on its way to the summit of Husband Hill.

Looking back to Jibsheet and Larry's Lookout and seeing all the tracks he made.

Here is the panorama of that view made on Sol 503 through the R Navcam.


jvandriel

from Sol500 (images available only now...):

If I'm not wrong, this stitch is an interesting Larry's side view!

Wonderful image composites dilo.
Looking at the last image and especially the end of the tracks made me think that the fine dust there might have similar properties (very fine grinded) as the dust Opportunity digged itself down in in Meridiani. So Spirit was lucky there wasnt more of it in that location. (might be a good idea to avoid places where such dust would accumulate like in downwind location etc)

Dilo, I like that one a lot ... it's my new desktop background. Thanks

Yeah, great work!

Phil

Wonderful-- it's my new Wallpaper, too.

What are the current thoughts on what is happening here? There is a cemented crust on the surface and a mobile subsurface. The slide area was interesting enough but the disturbed areas around the wheels are more so. And, unless I'm mistaken, I see a purple-colored subsoil like we saw on the climb up.

--Bill

On Earth, sediment transport processes tend to separate sand sized (1 to 0.1 mm, roughly) sized particles from smaller silt and clay sized particles. (Geologist's operational test to tell siltstone from claystone: nibble a bit between your front teeth. If it's gritty, it's got silt sized particles, if it's smooth, it's all clay sized!) Thus Earth gets lots of relatively well sorted sandstones, and very different silt dominated sediments on land and in rivers. Clay sized dust tends to stay in suspension in the air or rivers and ends up in the oceans as a component of marine oozes.

On Mars, the globally transported dust storm dusts are mostly clay sized... a few microns sized particles, and the dark dunes in craters and the north polar sand seas do appear both visually and from thermal properties to be reasonably well sorted sand grains, but a lot of the stuff the rovers are encountering seem to be a varied assortment of clay/silt/sand and granule (2 mm or so) sized materials, with all sorts of small scale sorting going on, but not making sediments with really well defined average particle sizes.

A big reason is the lack of water and it's roles in separating the different materials mechanically, and the lack of oceans to trap the eolian transported dust. A big question polar lander was to help answer and Phoenix will tackle is the nature of high latitude "dust and ice" deposits. The Polar Lander's targets are true polar deposits, it's unclear what the dirty ice (inferred from Odyssey's data) are that Phoenix is targeted for.

I integrated part of previous Larry's mosaic with more recent color images from PanCam and identified their location inside a "colorized" Sol507 NavCam stitch:

As a bonus, in the top/left insert there is also a portion of relatively rare full NavCam picture of a DD from the same day (as you know, most DD appear in subframes images... ).

Beautiful mosaic Dilo.
Great work!

I made a pano of Sol 507 too (using autostitch), but your composition beats it by an order of magnitude.

Tesheiner

great work, dilo !

makes me all the more looking forward to the images/mosaics to come with the
new terrain we are about to discover in the next weeks

Awesome work Dilo! And a great idea pointing out the locations of the different rock targets.

Here is a panoramic view of Jibsheet, Gusev Crater and Larry's Lookout taken with the L7 pancam.
The horizon is not perfect but this is the best result from Autostitch.
The original view is 21 MB. made from 48 pictures.

jvandriel

Here is a panoramic view of Gusev Crater with a good and straight horizon.
Panorama taken with the L5 Pancam.

jvandriel

Nice works, jvandriel.
I made similar mosaic from Sol510 pseudo-color images and, even if result is far from perfection, it still impressive:


OT quesstion: Do someone knows how to obtain flat horizon, force stitch of all image and eliminate luminosity differences inside autostitch, without image pre-processing? (if yes, pls, answer in the "Imagery & Tech Issues", where I just posted same question).

Dilo,
here is my version of the panoramic view of Tennesee Valley and Larry's Lookout.
Taken on sol 510 with the L5 Pancam.

It is in black and white. Your colour panorama is more spectacular.

jvandriel

Here is a better panoramic view of Larry's Lookout and tennesee Valley after changing the Gain parameter in Autostitch.

jvandriel

I see, huge stitch but as usual there is bad uniformity issue... now I discovered how to eliminate it and, thanks also to your suggestions... voilà:

Read the other thread to know settings I used!

Dilo:

Excellent work!

(and youse other guys, too!)

Bob Shaw

Thanks, this is a beautiful example of successful world-wide collaboration between individuals which do not know each other, but share the same passion!

Yes, Dilo, we are getting a lot of that here, and it is good to see it.

Phil

Nice one dilo!
Nico

Great jvandriel, this last monochrome pan is nearly perfect too! With it you well deserved a place in the hall of fame too

(Your patience with autostitch was worthwhile)

havn't had the time to closely follow the forum recently ...
just saw those wunderful panorama stitches.

Especially jvandriel's flat horizon monochrom image in reply #82
and dilo's color stitch in reply #87 (really like those colors... the shades of red just feel "right" for the martian scenery)
are spectacular

keep up the great work !

I had a hack at this one myself...



http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug_im...ten_val_510.jpg 2meg

Doug

...and this is the last (sniff) Larry's view from Sol514:

Pan from 497,498,500 50! color images

Full size is 25 MBytes

That's a LOT of images!

Great Alan!