Thanks for the polar, Paxdan. I've been wanting to see one. As suspected, it looks as though this depression is an eroded crater. I wonder if we can see shock or imapct effects in the strata underlying it (which should be the Gibson site)?

I'm waiting for a polar taken at the geometric center of Homeplate, or from the top of Pitchers Mound...

--Bill

I suspect those ones will have to wait 'till after winter.
Given the "hurry" to be at McCool by sol 800, I have the feeling the current IDD campaing will be the last one before packing and start driving again.

Time will tell.

Yes indeed, I do think that this will need to wait til Spring. I suspect that Spirit will now travel promptly across Homeplate and make her way up McCool Hill, with only a few stops along the way.

--Bill

Very nice panorama. I realy get the feeling of being there.

There are a some Spirit Sol 761 Front Hazcam images that haven't shown up on the main page yet. Looks like she's done a brushing and MI and is currently doing a Mossbauer (at least that's the last image at the moment).

Edit: I must have just caught it in the middle of an update or something; they're posted to the front page now.

Wow, image nr. one shows us Spirits shoulderjoint in detail that i did not see before ! Must be the unusual angle of illumination (normally this part of the image is much darker isn't it ?). What's all that " fluffy stuf" on it: dust ? Looks like old-fashioned tape made of some woven fabric's spun around it to attach something just before launch

and some MI's too
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...DQP2957M2M1.JPG

I wonder if the RAT is finished or if they've been saving whats left of it for homeplate.

Some new Pancams and some nice MIs have been posted (and they're not hidden for a change).

woaw this place, apart from the scientific importance...what a view...

I'm trying hard to assemble a 360 navcam for sols 746-750 with my version of the Gibson L257 I'm finishing up.
Looking at it I'm afraid there's some work ahead

Anyone succeeds with this pan using Autostitch? Haven't tried with Autostitch yet -in PTgui it involves a lot of manual addition of tie-points driving me nuts..



Nico

Oh, and Michael -thanks so much for another MMB version -can it get any better?

Nico

I thought these might be concretions at first - but maybe they are tektites?

http://origin.mars5.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/a...QP2957M2M1.HTML

Nico,

I did Gibson in L7 with autostitch.
No big problems, except for small disalignments around a partial L7 frame that seems to not be updated at the MER webpage.

But if by "pano" you mean those mixed nav-pancam panoramas, the answer is "not yet".

I have a few more tweaks that are going into another new version actually, like the panorama view quality will be a little better at certain magnifications, and screenshots will show the rover-relative azimuth, elevation and field of view at the bottom (you can already see that in the latest I posted). Then I'll probably have to take a break again for awhile, although I'd really like to tear out and rewrite the whole UI of the thing. Thanks for noticing

I've seen some of the Autostitched Gibson mosaics and they look real good.

It looks like I'll have to try further using PTgui for the nav/pancam combos. It works you know, it's just ALOTOFWORK...but the view is worth it -the plains, both summits, and Gibson in the middle

Nico

Some new color L257 images arrived from Sol749, making this nice East view...

A nice view indeed dilo!

These frames make the Gibson pan complete. James Canvin is also working on it and I've noticed some others are too.

And I'm trying to incorporate 'my' Gibson into a navcam 360...

I predict there will be as much different Home Plate-related pans by the time Spirit heads of as they are rocks visible in the scene

Nico

Could that be a Martian tektite that hit the ground and made ripples? It looks shinier than the typical blueberry, maybe it's an iron tektite?

Sunspot, maybe this is a bigger version of the little ones elsewhere?

PS
I don't know why, but when I tried keeping the picture in the reply using the attachmentid tag, it shows up in the preview post but not the real post?

Rough, ready, badly aligned, but it shows the extent of the thing.

I'm still missing a frame though.

Doug

I guess I'll join the panorama party
Autostitched version
Click to view attachment

Most tektites are pretty irregular in shape, and normally quite rough... concretions are produced by deposition from aqueous solution in rock - so I'm not inclined to believe we are seeing either.

What we do see appears to be many small and various sized vacuoles, most round, some not. Some of those cavities seem to have a spherule inside the cavity! As if the contents of a former protected vesicle (bubbles?) hardened.

What this looks like is light volcanic matter, complete with many small pockets of gas – some of those pockets replaced by mineral deposit – others not. Yet it is obviously layered.

I’d speculate numerous small deposits laid down by frequent small to medium expulsions by volcanic action that would have the heat and gas to form bubbles.

I've found tiny 'apache tears' in ash layers – droplets of ‘volcanic glass’ that falls into soft ash and hardens. But what we’re seeing here is definitely not that kind of ‘nodule’ – that is, if indeed some of those cavities contain a spherule.

Below is a snip of one image enlarged, with green arrows pointing to what may be tiny spherules, and some red arrows pointing to cavities with possible spherule content and a couple of other round-ish objects.

Does anyone else think these are spherules? Or, is what we're seeing a trick of lighting and high magnification...

VERY colorful!

On our way to the "Promised Land," in the Martian spring, we'll come back to HP for a lot more poking around... there's just too much of interest here to avoid taking longer to see what can be found.

I have to say that the light, irregular - rather flocculant-looking aggregations - are just that. Aggregations of the light dust which has been otherwise removed from the underlying sandstone by the IDD brush. The aggregations may have been partly produced by the brushing action, picked up by the brush itself, and then fell back onto the rock in more or less random locations. I believe they are entirely superficial to the rock, and could be removed by a puff of compressed gas (which BTW I have often wished MER had the capability to deliver - some of that clinging dust is very distracting.). The appearance of this sandstone seems no different to my nonprofessional eye than that of the piece of float brushed and MIed, down at the base of the section:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...A0P2936M2M1.JPG
Allowing for the difference in magnification, I see an identical sandstone, with dark, partly worn clasts plus a few light flocculent dust aggregations scattered across it. (Prof. Tim, If you see differences with your highly-trained eyes, I would be eager for another lecture!)
This does confirm that the original float examined was representative of the upper unit of HP, and so this revisit to the edge has scientific justification. But I agree there is no reason to postulate tektites or concretions in this MI. Those pearl-like large spheres down below, however, may be more provocative, and it's a pity there was no time to take MIs of them.

I just LOVE the optimism that nearly everyone expresses now. Last year, many comments were about how the MER's might not last much longer, and what would cause their ultimate demise. Now we just ASSUME that they will still be going strong next spring! And why not? They seem almost immortal.

David

- Yup, they do seem immortal - testament to the fine care they've been given by their opperators. We've been warned that either MER could die 'at any moment' - or 'tomorrow.'

And, yet I blither on like I'm sure there will be 'next spring.'

One thing encouraging, others must think there will be spring - and summer... we've seen funding extended to next September, have we not?

Thanks Alan. This is what I love about the false color images. They tend to bring a lot of contrast to details, such as those in the hill. Call me crazy, but I got to doodling and highlighted what look like interesting features. If this was in the hills of the Mojave desert and I had a hammer in my hand and a canteen on my belt, these are the features I'd go investigate.

Agreed - it does look little different (see enlarged snips below) other than that the image taken earlier has more fracture, and the smoother section at the lower left (my snip) shows more of what appears to be small vacuoles - but not a single micro-spherule - and isn't as high in magnification.

There is not much reason to believe that we'll see great differences in any of the material that makes up the layers of HP, but I sure would like to see a few more MI’s of various layers next spring.

Home Plate is certainly a star among the Columbia Hills cast of characters. And like any good entertainer knows that you've got to "leave them wanting more."

Great, alan. Here I made colours more "realistic" and uniform across your panorama...

Yeah, Dan. Even as I have been so infatuated by the rocks right under our noses, that rubbly lens striping across the opposing hill is enticing. Just what could it be? Perhaps volcaniclastic, but I have always been biased toward impact origins of rocks in the hills. Way back when we were atop Husband Hill I posted a sketch of some apparent layering in the hills across the basin. I've been meaning to go back to find it to see if they look anything like what we can now see more closely. I've been wondering why we don't see such obvious, large scale layering as we look back at Husband Hill.

The new MIs are interesting in context with the ones taken of the float on sol 754. When I first saw the unbrushed MIs on sol 754 I was pretty convinced this was a nicely rounded and sorted sandstone. The post brushing MI's really flipped me out when I saw all of the perfectly spherical "things" in a finer-grained matrix, along with another population of not-so-spherical to angular "things." Now, we get the sol 761 post-brush MIs showing many very spherical things across a pretty wide range of grain sizes, but still in a finer matrix. Some of the spherules seem to have internal structure.

If you look at the hazcams of the area they brushed, it looks like they chose a location right across the crest of a ripple on an exposed bedding plane. (The rock brushed is just above the MI in this prebrush hazcam.) http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...QP1110L0M1.HTML I Autostiched the MI's from sol 761, which are attached.

At this point I seriously doubt the nicely rounded grains were rounded by eolian erosion. It seems to be a genetic condition. My current working hypothesis is that the fine-grained matrix is ash or dust, and that the spherules are volcanic or impact spherules which condensed as droplets from a vapor or solidified from a spray of molten material. Kind of like tektites, but not affected by deformation from high velocity deformation while molten. Yet, they don't look like lapilli to me. Now more than ever I wish they had done a quick Mi of that larger spherule noticed previously. It was so large that it makes me suspicious of my hypothesis.

DFinfrock: Do you really think they might visit the "Promised Land?" That area really makes me wonder.

Ah ha. I see a couple of puzzle-pieces fitting together. Here we have what appears to be a frothy rock with many small vesicles. On the way here we encountered Fractal Spongebob, a wildly vesicular basalt. Colors don't match, but still...

I'm not real strong on my volcanic petrology, but we have two examples of what might be a very fluid, very gassy lava.

--Bill



PS-- CR snuked in on me. Yeppers, this is going to be a very, very fruitful area. And McCool Hill beckons Spirit for the nex few Sol's travel. Look at Alan's color route map, there are planty of layers and lineations to keep us busy. And at the crest we see an impact crater, so we can see a section.

"Promised Land?" Hopefully, our Rover's middle name is _not_ Moses...

Band 2 and band 7 of the rat-brushing. Some of the raw data on the brushed spot is saturated white or black or both in the 2 images.

A little late but here is the complete 360 degree panoramic view of Home Plate.

Taken with the L0 navcam on Sol 746, Sol 748 and Sol 750.

jvandriel

Well my laptop struggled, but it's finally finished the full resolution Gibson pan.



Enjoy,

James

Beautiful work James!

Nico

Extending the sky to the sides is a nice touch.

WOW ! very impressive panorama work, james

Yes indeed impressive. I love the naturalness of the colours. I think you've nailed this one!

Just breathtaking. Can't stop watching it. Thanks thanks thanks

Great pans jvandriel & James! Great job of smoothing out the colours, James.



Good points, Tom. The round, dark beads sure look primary and there have been some suggestions that basaltic glass was present in some of the Columbia Hills rocks. If Home Plate was the source vent, then the closest earth anolgue previously suggested would be a tuff ring or maar volcanoe, which would imply some sort of interaction with ground or surface water.

Brilliant James there is so much detail I could look at the picture for ages.
Roy F

Actually, my comment was just quoting Sattrackpro. But I'm all for visiting the Promised Land... after a winter on McCool Hill and a trip back to HP. I imagine it will be easy to come up with lots of names for the Promised Land features when we get there. But will we have to find and cross the River Jordan before we get there?

David

Ahh, I see my error. I should have asked Sattrackpro. That's what I get for staying up too late geologizing.

Hey, let's get biblical. That should be fun. The River Jordan may be less a problem than all that flowing milk and honey. Seriously though, I really wonder if they might visit this place next spring, rather than beating up Spirit by climbing another hill. The Promised Land (bottom entry on this page) looks like another completely different terrain, and I can't help but think it is a remnant of even more ancient layers which were uplifted with the hills, and which escaped burial by the basalt which flooded the crater. I don't know if there might be any of the postulated lake bed sediments there, but whatever it is, it seems to be something completely different from anything we've seen in Gusev so far. From what I have been able to find on the web and what I have heard on the street, the Promised Land does sound like it is a target that is seriously being contemplated.

After this home run, and the survival through one more Martian winter, the PL becomes my next hoped-for Holy Grail. The viability of this area as the next target might be a good question to ask someone in the know, the next time an opportunity arises.

Here is a panoramic view of Home Plate and McCool Hill.

Taken on Sol 758 with the L2 pancam.

I have choosen the L2 images for better contrast.

jvandriel

That's it. It looks terrific JV. I'm divorcing PTgui for Navcam panoramas.

Nico

Today's download seams to point at the exact position Spirit was when she took this wonderfull pan. Right ?

Here is the Autostitched mosaic of the sol 763 MIs of the ripple on the next rock.

The thing that intrigues me about this spheroid thing is the context in which it lies. It's not just a pebble lying randomly on the surface, it is centered in a roughly oval shaped formation in the rock, and there are clearly rings in the rock centered upon it - I see approximately 3 dark rings centered on the spheroid at approximately 1 spheroid radius intervals -- and no, those are not compression artifacts, they're of a much different scale. There may also be hints of radial lineations. Thus it appears that this thing is lying in the context where it formed, whether by concretion or other means. Surely some geologist-type has seen an earth analog of something like this. Conceivably it's a lump of volcanic glass embedded in the matrix, and somehow its presence modified the matrix in its vicinity to create the features we see today.

A better sense of the scale of the spheroid would be helpful. Simply in terms of the power of the pancams to resolve it, it is considerably larger than the hematite blueberries at Meridiani.

I am shocked (shocked, I tell you ) that there doesn't seem to be a single MI image of this thing.

Hmmm... ...hot water, minerals, and the rest... ...do I hear the word geode?

Where's that saw...

Bob Shaw

False color version of 758 panorama
Click to view attachment

Why is the far edge of HP so *bright*?

Bob Shaw