Isn't that the face of McCool Hill where we plan to spend the winter? (If it isn't, don't tell me; I can't handle the confusion ) We should have gobs of time to check out those shelves after HP. If we went there now we'd be called out for leaving the baseline (non-baseball fans, please ignore)

<delurk>
At the risk of being irritating but not helping, I remember that a large squarish rock was neatly sillhouetted against the horizon in an earlier image - IIRC it was a pancam shot shortly after moving off from El Dorado... but being a newcomer here I thought "hmmm, that looks interesting, I wonder what the ums people will make of it?" otherwise I'd have delurked...

<lurk>

no, McCool hill is further south...

Oh, that was from that LGM on the pogo stick! Didn't you see him in that HazCam shot the other day? I forget the sol. He made a rude gesture and bounced away.

BTW, Alan, if you're out there somewhere (can't see you), how about one of your gorgeous color pans with the latest positions? TIA

P.S. Will you PLEASE label prominently McCool Hill ! I'm dyin' out here!

Inner Basin - labelled

Line forms on the right, Imi, (mind if I call you Imi?) So far Dilo and me and Toma and you have all been suckered by that "Big Black Rock". Then Dilo did the parallax and estimated the distance at 46 meters and width at 35 cm.
My eyes and brain tell me "NO WAY! But how do you argue with the numbers? I will say this, however. If that sucker is only 35 cm across, then all those "boulders" covering the rise in front are only pebbles!
I'd better stay on earth. Mars is too confuuuusing!

McCool Hill

Thanx, General. I realize now that our abalone friend was looking at the bright line in the center right of this picture. I was looking at the ridges up to the left on the side of the hill (McCool Hill! At least I got that right.)
keep on truckin', brain.

Hi Shaka,




> (mind if I call you Imi?)

"Please call me Eddie if it helps you relax"

Yes, I saw Dilo's post. I wonder if the parallax tool puts any constraints on accuracy? (Although it would have to be grossly inaccurate indeed for 35cm to turn into the 3m or so that it appeared to me.) *thinks* You know, I think I'll have to go back and see if I can find the original image in question. Surely, a 35cm rock would have to be very close to appear the size I remember, well within 10m. Unless I'm completely misjudging all the distances. The amazing panoramas of the inner based from Husband Hill seem eerily familiar to landforms I see every day - (though presumably that's entirely coincidental, aren't the Columbia Hills believed to be ejecta from a large impact?) I suspect my eye's making assumptions about scale based on the shapes of landforms that aren't actually valid under Martian conditions, and viewed via digital images from the pancam...

I suppose it's just *as* likely that I saw a different rock altogether...

Found it, I think... Pancam:
http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/...00P2434L7M1.JPG
http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/...00P2434R1M1.JPG

Nazcam:
http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/...00P0695L0M1.JPG
http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/...00P0695R0M1.JPG

Then there's a similar rock three days later (or is it just another rock, against a different horizon?):

http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/...CWP0735L0M1.JPG
http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/...CWP0735R0M1.JPG

http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/...CNP1600L0M1.JPG
http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/...CNP1600R0M1.JPG


Incidentally -- whilst I was blitzing through two weeks' worth of images, I happened to spot these, which I'm sure are meteors. ISTR seeing someone here saying that these lines were instrument artifacts caused by cosmic rays. Well, these ones are definitely meteors. I used to go meteor-watching 5-10 years ago and these images have the classic tapering shape. Hmmm, I suppose they can't be easily associated with showers we see on earth.

(Edited to add links...
http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/...E1P2741R1M1.JPG
http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/...E1P2741R1M1.JPG
http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/...E1P2741R1M1.JPG

Hmm, did I manage to post the same thing twice up there? Apologies to the regulars for the noise :/

Yes I agree with you Imipak, no doubt at all in my mind those are meteroite traols for the first and last of those in your added links.

I have to disagree, guys - those look like classic cosmic ray trails to me. Those are R1 pancam shots - that means they're heavily filtered. Our only shot at real meteors is through the open L1 filter position.

As I've written before, I'm very sceptical that any meteors have been caught by the rovers. Even the press release photos here claimed only possible meteors.

Below is a sunset or sunrise, which? I think it is of sunrise in the east part of Columbia Hill. Let suppose that its position is south of Columbia Hill and the sunset must set on almost plain west side but I think that Spirit is below of a small hill and its mountain shape is not like a hill. The sun corona is not circular. Some optical distortion.. Nice shotting!

Click to view attachment

Rodolfo

Wow, I hadn't seen that release, I'm afraid it doesn't back you up very well - going on the blurb there, if the MER team think it's worth trying to spot meteors, presumably it's within the capabilities of the cameras if Martian meteors emit as much light as they expect. Apart from that, all I have to back this idea up is that the pancam images look like typical earth meteors; cf for example the sort of images that show up in a google search:

http://images.google.com/images?q=meteors&...G=Search+Images

(skipping some of the more, um, imaginative shots - the classic tapered diamond shape is pretty characteristic IIRC. The only other thing I have is a note on Wikipedia that Spirit already spotted a meteor:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_showers .

Why might filters would prevent meteor trails being caught? Is that particular filter only allowing non-meteor-type wavelengths through?

The R1 filter (and most others) only lets in a small fraction of the total spectrum of light (blue/violet for R1). L1 is empty so all the light hits the ccd. The thing is that the pancam focal ratios are only f/20 - that's really slow by astrophotography standards. Meteors move very quickly across the sky, so even with a fast (f/2 or whatever) camera system it's hard to get anything but the rare few very bright ones. That's why I'm skeptical that an f/20 system (that's 100 times less sensitive than f/2!) can catch any.

I stitched the latest 6 color images of the hill to the west of Spirit (Jan 15 folder on the exploratorium). The left frame is only bands 5 and 7, saturation stretched for rough compatibility.

That will be the sun setting in the west.

Doug

A 360 degree panoramic view from Sol 721.

Taken with the L0 navcam.

jvandriel

Here is the complete 360 degree Pancam L1 panoramic view from Sol 720.

jvandriel

Agree with you after viewing the jvandriel A 360 degree panoramic view from Sol 721.

Rodolfo

Given the time the image was taken...the sun don't rise at 5pm

Doug

Some new Pancam images back toward Husband Hill from this vantage point:

Rodolfo

I haven't had time to follow Spirit's progress towards Home Plate and I'm kinda lost Would someone mind labelling jvandriel's excellent 360 panorama from sol 721 with the locations of Husband Hill, Eldorado, Comanche, McCool Hill and Home Plate?

Thanks in advance, much appreciated!

Aldo.

Sorry, that should've been the 360 panorama from sol 720.

Here it is.

I used another version I made some days ago (link). Jvandriel's is much better but I guess it may be too small.

Click to view attachment (997k)

Thanks Tesheiner! I am found!!

Here is a bigger one.

Sol 720 L1. The original one is 13.2Mb and consist of 27 images.

jvandriel

Here's my version with the third and final frame of this sequence added.

Click to view attachment

Some nice rocks around here.

James

And my version of this one, still missing a bit from the leftmost L2 frame.

Click to view attachment

James

Here's a wide-angle view that kind of puts it all together (it's a bit distorted due to the wide angle). Facing roughly north:



And my false-color version of the three-frame Pancam mosaic on Navcam backgroud:

Hey, did someone noticed how porous are darker rocks (almost fractal) and how different from the clear rounded ones? Could be only age? I think also composition/origin are involved...

Tomorrow (sol 726) is driving day again.

This is the Polar version...

That's later tosol

Yeah, what the hell is that stuff?! That lump in the middle of the img Dilo posted looks almost tubular on the side facing the camera. The pores or voids look spherical (well, sections of spheres) which I would guess means gas was present as the rock solidified; and that this means it's volcanic. On the other hand.. speculating wildly... perhaps it's chunks of impactors? Hmmm, no craters around them so that can't be right... Come on geologists, don't you know an open goal when you see one?

When looking at these landscapes and trying to imagine the processes that made things the shape they are, I have difficulty picturing relative timescales. How did all these rocks arrive where they are? Presumably they can't have just weathered out of the bedrock where they lie - well, obviously not, or there wouldn't be such variety. Presumably over time, all other things being equal, the surface would tend towards a perfect sphere - a flat plane with sand or dust dunes over everything. (This might take a few more billion years without any major events to mature.) In the absence of anything to transport them except wind, these rocks must have lain there for a very long time. (I had a mad thought that *all* the rocks on the surface could be meteorites, the same sort of way that any rock found lying on the surface of the ice in Antarctica has to be a meteorite. Could they all be the result of impacts, either a mixture of bedrock from different layers, excavated and scattered around by the impact? OK, well I think the rates of impacts of various sizes are fairly well known... )

What would the inner basin have looked like 100 years ago? 1 million? 100 million?

...my brain hurts!
(but in a good way... )

RE: dilo's weird stuff. It is almost too strange to comment on; "fractal" is an appropriate descripton. It looks almost frothy, like a very gassy, fluid lava. Or it may be odd aeolian erosion. My ig-met-pet is textbook 101 and 30 years stale, so I shan't hypothesize further.

I hope that we get some closer Pancam's and MI's on these critters. And note the orangeish rock in the upper left.

--Bill

Well, it seems the rate of impacts, particularly various sizes, it not known at all. Much 'science' is pure speculation based on the prognostications of what some deem ‘experts.’ They used to ‘date’ by counting impact craters – then figured out, most belatedly, recently, that larger impacts cause many smaller ones... duh!

With prognosticators being that lame, anyone with half a brain has just as good a guess as the ‘experts’ – who apparently habitually keep their brains far too well pickled.

Considering that experts today claim that about 100 tons of meteoroids hit the Earth every day – it would be interesting to see what they think the daily tonnage rate of meteoroids on Mars is.

I’m skeptical of these ‘mini-craters’ seen on Mars being caused by anything directly from space, despite thin atmosphere – but, I’m certain that many a piece of larger meteors are indeed part of the landscape we have seen in these photos. If those mini-craters where MER-B is are caused by a meteor of any size, they are more likely something blown into the sky by the original object, and less likely to be a grain-of-sand-like fragment of the original, especially in the region where MER-B is. That is, unless there are far more exploding meteors on Mars than we have reliable knowledge of.

Many people are not aware that quite often larger meteors entering earth's atmosphere often explode prior to impact - making the 'impact' a large number of impacts of various degrees of force. I have not seen reliable data on the frequency and probability of this happening in the Mars atmosphere - but low angular entry could make this possible on Mars as well. (Consider the likelihood of multiple orbits before lower Mars gravity finally brings down a 'captured' meteor.)

My guess is that 1000 years ago the inner basin looked pretty much as it does today, give or take a few craters here and there. But, there would most likely be fewer and smaller dunes - and less 'smooth' area devoid of exposed rock on the surface. Beyond a few thousand years, what it looked like is simply a guess, yours being just as good, if not better, than anyone else might claim.

Bill, yours is as good as any! It is the thoughts of others that really make this a very interesting place - whether or not the 'thoughts' rank high among the 'scientific' or not... *grin*

That one rock might be from one of those 'rubble pile' asteroids or meteoroids they talk about - with unusually low densities in composition. Two of them are 253 Mathilda (~1.3 g/cc) and 25143 Itokawa (~2.3 g/cc). No one has come up with a solid explanation of how and where these things formed - but, one is that they were blown off of a planet perhaps a lot like earth, another is that a planet a lot like earth exploded one day eons ago. Whatever the story... that rock looks like a conglomerate loosely cobbled together... how and from where is where the fun begins!

That was exactly the point I was going to make. I don't think the voids in the rock's surfaces are from gas bubbles, I think they're from clasts falling out of what is either a sedimentary conglomerate, an ashflow tuff or a breccia. The rock looks sort of bristly or bumpy, as if the rock face is made primarily of clasts that have no yet been de-socketed.

I see a lot of examples of this kind of rock in the referenced image. There are two other easily identifiable types of rock in the image -- the dense, very fine-grained basalts (which look bluish in this not-exactly-true-color image, and tend to form ventifacts) and what appears to be a less dense, more frothy, vesicular basalt that shows a lot of swiss-cheese-like holes. But these seem to be far different from the conglomerate rocks in the image, with a glassier-looking patina and without the little pebble-sized clasts sticking out of the rock face.

-the other Doug

Uh... gosh-wow-Boy-oh-BOY!

Ok... The multi-colored soil.. I had to fake band 7 data in the lower right from band 5 data. I've contrast stretched the bright end and edge sharpened for detail.

The next image is band 5 and 7 data only, and missing data again at lower right, so there's no color there at all. This thing really does look conglomerate'ish, or maybe impact breccia. Fair bit of jpg artifacting in this one enhanced by the sharpening

The fractal spongebob rock.. I processed much like the first pic. It hit the upload size limit so I cropped to get just the rock. The only thing I've seen that looks like this (unless it looks different if we get a closer look) is the bizarre sponge you get if you pour molten lead into a bucket of water. NOW.. I'm NOT suggesting that's something like how this formed.... but my impression is a matrix of erosion resistant whatever that used to enclose and surround grains of something else that has weathered away much faster then the matrix, leaving the matrix as a super-sponge webwork.

I want to get to homeplate, but I'd really like looks at these two weird rocks.

D'oh. Looks like my prediction that Spirit would be quick on her way away from the bright stuff was wrong. Drive imaging on exploratorium shows just a 180 degree turn in place.

I guess they decided to look at this stuff more, or the drive was cut short.

Here's a quicklook pan of the 3 navcam images from the exploratorium's 1/17 folder.

Whew, I think that Doug the Other has it nailed. A breccia that is falling apart. Remember the appearance of that rock that Spirit climbed at Comanche-- it had that "clastic" look too it.

Thanks, too, Ed for your images. I wonder if your "conglomerate'ish" rock is a piece of weathered the Homeplate formation? And your "fractal spongebob rock" image is, well, _is_. I do like that nomenclature.

I can't stay here and chant a 'hmmmm' mantra over these new pix; got to go off to work and earn my keep.

To paraphrase Lyford, "zis is not weird, zis is super-weird". I think that things are going to get even stranger as we approach Homeplate and Pitcher's Mound...

--Bill

I messed with gamma - harsh like, to better see into the hollowed out end of this thing. There seems to be parts of the original laying all around this larger piece.

Perhaps on decent from on-high, it hit that harder job right in front of it, broke into many pieces and bounced up in the air and landed all about... you know how that song goes...

It looks like bright material is a thin layer. Spirit appears to have dug through it.
Click to view attachment

Is the bright ones a salty sand?

Rodolfo

Here's my 2 cents: the conglomerate type rock might be similar to Voltaire, which also had large, rounded clasts but was interpretted to be an impact breccia. The darker, porous rocks could be scoria (pumice), which is derived from explosive volcanic eruptions with an extremely high gas content.

Spirit observed similar examples before, such as this from sol 111:

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...AYP2560L5M1.JPG

There are some possible cinder cones northeast Thira Crater, so this style of volcanism may not be uncommon in the Gusev area:

http://themis-data.asu.edu/img/V05662001_B3.png

ahhh, so maybe this was a deliberate trenching manoeuvre to get a look at the dpth of the bright material?