next stop on the rim of Home Plate:

http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/...BZP0715R0M1.JPG

It's a rock.



PS: The one I used to measure the driving distance; it's about 0.55m width.

Looks like an hugging and kissing of two rocks

Reminds me a lot of good 'ol Humphrey.

The driving terrain from here to HP looks fantastic.

Doug

It looks as though Spirit is taking the "direct route" (as opposed to the round-about route) to Homeplate.

My first impression of the "YinYang rock" is that a piece of weathered basalt has been dropped into uconsolidated material. There is a tantalizing Pancam that catches the edge of this rock, but nothing better thus far. Hopeully we'll at least get a Navcam view of the other side.

A couple more Sols and we'll be at Homeplate.

--Bill

A 360 degree panoramic view if Inner Basin.

Taken on Sol 730 and Sol 731 with the L0 navcam.

jvandriel

Would be nice - but it'll probably be about Sol 745-747 before we get to a point where MER-A actually sets wheels on HP. Too many short drives upcoming... methinks in another two or three sols, fewer clear long drives can easily be mapped.

and a look into the driving direction.

Taken on Sol 731 with the L7 pancam.

jvandriel

Thanks for that view, jvandriel - expectations do grow...

It ~looks~ like smooth sailing from here on... but I'm betting we'll see fewer long drives like those between 712 and 714, and more shorter drives like that of 729... something like the following, overwritten on a chunk of Tesheiner's latest route map.

Based on the current pics (sol 732) I would say longer drives upcoming, at least for the next two(?) sols. But once Spirit arrives at the slopes near HP, it'll be time to shorter moves.

Hope you are right, Tesh... several like those 712 to 714 would sure be nice !

New traverse maps are posted for Spirit.

http://origin.mars5.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/tm-spirit/

Man, it's amazing how much progress Spirit has made in such a short time. Nice panoramas, jvandriel.


Bill, Rock #4 looks like vesicular basalt, similar to what was seen on the Gusev plains, such as this:


http://www.marsgeo.com/Photos/Spirit/Layer...icles128Lze.jpg

Now Spirit is around 270-280 meters away from the center of Home Plate.



Rodolfo

I wonder if there's an effor to get the flash emptied out a little before getting to Homeplate. Some images of brushed targets from back on sol 690 just came down along with quite a few three week old+ images

Don't ask why (just a bit of fun really) but I had a play with one of the new sets that came down from a while back. Probably because of the slope and the pointing direction, it was an odd perspecitve, which looked 'small' - so I added a huge focus pull to make it worse.

Doug

Doug, after viewing your image for some time it just strikes me that the ground looks damp. There's little 'groove' areas in the sand that appear darker than the surrounding sand like a runoff lane. It really looks like the surface here is just itching to be wet. I wonder what it would feel like to scoop up a handful of the stuff?

I think it'd feel like talc in places. I know that it can 'appear' wet, but that's a symptom, I think, of the way that the dust pools in places courtesy of wind, and being darker, in little patches, it looks damp.

It's very hard to simulated amazingly fine, dry, dusty material on earth because the atmosphere contains so much water compared to mars.

I can honestly say I've never seen anything that's made me think of mud or damp soil at any point, and all the evidence suggests that only under very very rare conditions on mars might one get anything other than ice content within the soil, and more often than not the transition would be sublimation.

On a large scale ( meridiani planum's dunes ) and a tiny scale ( little pockets of gusev dust ) - Mars can play games with you, looking like vast oceans and/or little puddles.

Doug

Here's a Pancam anaglyph view in the drive direction.

A view into the driving direction.

Homeplate.

Taken with the L7 pancam on Sol 732.

jvandriel

Quite by chance the latest copy of S&T which I have has a Clementine image of Dionysius. That's an unusual crater, with a 'compositional' ray structure rather than a ray system made of un-weathered, churned up debris. In the case of Dionysius, there was a darker layer well *below* the surface, and it gives an interesting 'ground truth' on the distribution of debris. I confess that I'm still not sure whether or not we'd see Home Plate material where we are now (presumably about the magical one crater radius position).

Bob Shaw

Mmmm, nice. How far away is that rise dead ahead? Seems like we could run all the way to its base without hazard.

How smooth and featureless does a rock have to be before a "vesicular basalt" becomes a "non-vesicular basalt'? Or does the latter not exist? (I'm not a geologist, so I don't know.)
This classification exercise is quintessentially scientific, and I wouldn't be a scientist if I didn't encourage it. As a biologist I am familiar with the problems of classifying animals and plants. We call the exercise systematics or taxonomy. When I have had to try the exercise with my own animals, I have suffered from a tendency to be a "lumper" rather than a "splitter". That is I tend to see continua rather than discrete taxa or species or demes or what-have-you. How confident are you geologists out there that your 3 or 4 rock types are discrete and not 1 or 2 continua ? I can see that a breccia (whether impact or volcanic) has a unique event in its genesis to separate it from other igneous rocks. Can the other types of basalt we are seeing be separated with similar confidence?
Thank you for trying to enlighten me.

Interesting how there's a relative abundance of the dark (scoria?) rocks on the ridge south of Home Plate......or is that just a lighting effect?

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...BZP2447L7M1.JPG

Shaka, the vesicles were formed by gas bubbles within the volcanic flow. Not all flows will develop vesicles. When the vesicles are present, they may not be evenly distributed within the flow and their size can vary from flow to flow. It's been a while since I looked at a geology book, but I believe as long as the vesicles are visible to the naked eye, the rock can be described as being vesicular.

Working from memory (I did the exercise this evening... now is 22:00 PM) it's about 100m maybe a bit more. Two driving days?

BTW, sol 733 (tosol) is driving day too. My bet is for a long drive.

Thanx. Have we yet seen any "non-vesicular" basalts on Mars? Could all the rocks in the picture above (including SpongeBob) be placed along a continuum? Or is Spongebob a unique type rather than an extreme example?
(I'm not trying for a freebie geology degree here. Just say so if I need to go read an undergraduate textbook.)

The majority of the rocks on the Gusev plain are massive ("non-vesicular"), examples being Planck, Route 66, Adirondack, Mazatzal. These could represent the deeper portions of the original lava flows. The vesicular rocks could represent the upper portions of these very same flows, representing zones where gases were able escape into the atmosphere. These flows are believed to have originated from the volcano Apollinaris Patera to the north.

The other massive rocks that were observed were Backstay and Irvine. These are interpreted to be intrusive rocks (magma never made it to the surface) and are not related to the Apollinaris flows.

The breccia and "spongebob" rocks would represent additional depositional events that are different and separate from these.

I have a breakdown of Gusev rock types on my site, if you haven't checked it out before: http://www.marsgeo.com/Spirit/RockTypes.htm

Hope that helps

It certainly does, as did your excellent rocks page (I did visit it months ago but didn't bookmark it. That is now remedied.)
I guess we can both be comfortable with the "massive/vesicular dichotomy". To me it's a basalt continuum, with a descriptive shift when the first macroscopic vesicle appears. You haven't quite spelled out where the spongebob type goes on your webpage, or are you going to add a new type? Maybe we haven't yet made an adequate study of them?

Even the massive stuff has the odd bubble in it, I'd say. And you do seem to get that characteristic sort of 'broken basalt' shape, too. Like fat pyramids, that sort of thing (you know what I mean!).

I wonder if there's anything like the columnar basalts of the Giants Causeway (Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland) or Staffa (Scotland) on Mars? That'd be a helluva thing to see...

Bob Shaw

Doug:

I almost didn't download that because of my slow connection. I hate to miss your images though. That was a fascinating composition. I don't know quite how you did that focus thing, but it was one of the most realistic MER images I've seen. It kind of reminded me of the time I opened my eyes one morning, after I slept in the open desert.

I really liked that.

That "broken basalt shape" is probably at least partly due to wind erosion. Ventifacts typically have a faceted pyramid shape and a "silky" surface structure.

Offhand I can't think of any reason why columnar basalt shouldn't form on Mars. I think it requires pyroxene-rich lavas and rapid cooling. Possibly the thin atmosphere might slow the cooling a bit, but on the other hand ambient temperatures are lower.

tty

To cite a major authority, IIRC Kim Stanley Robinson mentioned it in one of his volumes. He wouldn't make it up, would he?

Spirit drove again on sol 733.

It was a bit tricky to locate the new position on 732 images, but Spirit seems to be near the "little red dots".

Click to view attachment Pancam images from sol 732 (181k)

Click to view attachment Navcam images from sol 733 (254k)

The net drive was 43-44m.

Look back at El Dorado,Commanche,Miami and Allegheny Ridge from sol 733...
Stiched in Autostich...

Click to view attachment

Those pics are from sol 732 (site/drive id = ANBZ), TomaB.
Current site is ANE9.



Edited: Correction. The pictures were taken on sol 733, you are right. But they were taken before driving to the new (current) position.

They all seem so far far away now. The view from on top of Home Plate should be nice. Not to mention from the top of Mcool Hill, if thats where Spirit is heading.

What's the reason for such a zig-zag?
I remember seeing that same thing when descending from the summit by Haskins Ridge. But here, on such a flat terrain?
Those peebles don't look like hazards to be avoided by the autonav...

Click to view attachment (191k)

But they do, they do!
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/na...BZP0615L0M1.JPG

A 360 degree panoramic view of Inner Basin and Homeplate.

Taken with the L0 navcam on Sol 732 and Sol 733.

jvandriel

Maybe there won't be too much time for Home Plate Speculations because Spirit is driving as much as possible.



Yet another driving day.

polar view of jvandriel's latest pan.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Homeplate coming closer and closer.

A mosaic, later maybe a complete panorama, taken with the L0 navcam on Sol 733.

jvandriel

Those tracks look like Spirit was probably running completely autonomous, rather than on direct commands. I’m thinking the effort is to get further than we could safely expect with direct commands, and we may see more of this, not less.

It looks to me like the rock on the left side of the image caused it.

It is evident that the track on the right side of the picture has higher disturbance. It might be due to the somewhat loose the right front wheel. As you know, when the rover wants to go straight, you have seen a perfect straight track line. This case, this is an deliverated maneuver. I think that the rovers are overlooking in order to check about the compactness of the floor.

Rodolfo

Spirit drove again on Sol734...

Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

I can't wait to see new traverse map from Tesheiner...

Not trying to offend anyone here - but what's the point in attached two images to a post, when we all know that those two images are at the Exploratorium. Much better all round, to simply post the links isnt it? It's un-necessary to add those files to the ever growing attachments folder of this place. It adds to peoples browsing bandwidth by having to load the thumbnails, the server's loading by having to make the thumbnails, the server bandwidth by delivering the images, and the server's storage by hosting them. If you've made something new, annotated an image or made a map, a mosaic etc and have no where to host it, then by all means attach it - but to attach raw MER imagery when we all know it's sat on other servers is a bit wastefull of resouces.

Doug

The traverse map will be posted in a minute or two...
But let me use instead of , because the net movement was about 10m. Quite short, imho.

OK you are right...I will not do it in the future...

Well not quite...
I know something about slow dial-up connection because I'm using it at home...I like thumbnails because I don't have to download whole image just to see what it is all about...Average Thumb. is <10kb and average image can be at least 100kb...

OK...sorry Doug!

Usually the tracks are smooth, even while driving in autonav mode.
There was a sort of "anomaly" while driving down from El Dorado/Ultreya during sol 713 (see links below). But I don't know if this is something similar or not.
We need an expert here, or just wait for the next status report.

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/sta...All.html#sol708
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...BUP1219L0M1.JPG