Curiosity has put more than 400 meters on the odometer and tosol (sol 56) she bumped up to a sand drift that we now know (via Twitter) is named Rocknest and will be the site of the first sample grab. In last week's press briefing, John Grotzinger warned that we will be here for "what seems like a very long time," 2-3 weeks. They will have to run several samples through the SA-SPaH (Sample Acquisition, Processing and Handling subsystem, pronounced "Saw-spa") and in particular CHIMRA (Collection and Handling for In situ Martian Rock Analysis, pronounced "chimera") in order to "clean" it of any remaining Earthly contamination with good Mars dirt before they deliver the first sample to SAM or Chemin. So this seems like a good place to start a new thread.

As usual, discuss stuff that happened through sol 56 in the previous thread.

Putting this here because assume they will discuss future plans....

NASA HOSTS OCT. 4 TELECONFERENCE ABOUT MARS CURIOSITY ROVER PROGRESS

NASA will host a media teleconference at 11 a.m. PDT (2 p.m. EDT) Thursday, Oct. 4, to provide a status update on the Curiosity rover's mission to Mars' Gale Crater.

http://www.nasa.gov/news/media/newsaudio/index.html

Craig

Sol 57 navcam anaglyph:
Click to view attachment

Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

Stomp!

Actually, this says a lot about the plasticity of the surface at Glenelg.

Oops no it doesn't. That's a tire....not a print. But what are the fibers?

Renee

We see a lot of wonderful anaglyphs these days, and thanks to all! But this one is particularly good.

Navcam pan of Sol 57. Anaglyp version is fine too .





What a wonerful site !

Just looking at the images as an amateur I would suppose that there is coarser material on top of much finer material. And no - its not a tire and the "fibers" are just cracks or fractions in the "sand".

I can recall that the martian soil is acting like a wet sand, but it's actually very dry. The consequence of a material named "maghemite" (imagine a magnet, but in powder, it's pretty much like that). At the surface of this dune, there is a crust, where the sand particles have got some cohesion because of the alternance of wetting and drying. So then, when you walk on it, its like you're walking on snow, with a surface which became hard due to sunlight. And under, you have some wet-but-yet-dry soil.
I hope I was clear

The navcam pans are really nice!

I hope it is OK for Ant103 - I did go over his anaglyph and made it a bit brighter (of course this kills the mood a bit):

Click to view attachment

Oh no, that's not a problem. But yes, with jpeg compression and brightening, the stereoscopic effect is reduced.

PS : Panos updated.

"Just looking at the images as an amateur I would suppose that there is coarser material on top of much finer material. And no - its not a tire and the "fibers" are just cracks or fractions in the "sand"."

Thar being the case, isn't the'surface" pretty unexpected?

Renee

To me, it looks very similar to what was seen when the MERs drove into ripples. A slightly crusty surface is expected.

Look identical to similar exercises at Gusev and Meridiani.

For comparison, here is from Spirit on sols 72 and 74.

Click to view attachment

Actually, now that I see it, you're right. I just was not expecting that sub-surface. I was expecting more sand.
Renee

Wheel digging at rocknest on Sol 57:

Click to view attachment
click here to enlarge the animation

seen from the HazCam

Cheers, Udo

... and from the MastCam:

Click to view attachment
click to enlarge the animation

Udo

Are we looking approx. North? I think I can see the northern inlet channel, in the crater wall - in the center of the anaglyph! If so - that is sharp and bright!

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&id=28432

And I was ( once again ) poorly oriented.

News Conference Starting

8gs! I guess Phoenix's poor performance during sample drop off really put them off at the time! (Drop that load properly you lousy piece of hardware! )

great cross eyed image

The slight slumping and cracking around the wheel marks seem to imply some sort of lightly cemented crust. So these little drifts are probably not active. ( I see that this has been discussed. But could all these drifts the mers and curiosity have treaded be inactive because they are crusted?)

Sol 58 images coming down now. I like this one:


Full size

Animation of arm movement between 1 pm and 3 pm local time:

Click to view attachment
click to enlarge

the animation begins with the APXS measurement at 1 pm. The instrument changes to MAHLI followed by undisturbed and wheel disturbed soil region images respectively.

Undisturbed soil image:

Click to view attachment

Cheers, Udo

Re: Emily's post #466 pic - that really looks like it was wet not so long ago.

To me it looks exactly like flour. Completely dry, yet cohesive -- that's the nature of very fine-grained material.

Really nice MAHLI images coming in - SOL 58:

Click to view attachment

I would estimate the rips on the wheel profile to 3-5 mm width - just as a rough scale. You can even see the fine manufacturing texture from the flat wheel surfaces, must be very fine material then.

Exacly like fine flour, cornflour, talc, exceptionally fine grained dry material.

So do those little clumps break up into powder under pressure? Or are they solid but get pushed under the fine powder as the wheel moves over them?

Seeing MAHLI's images of the scuffed ripple's interior, a question popped in my head; is the chemical makeup of sand drifts all over Mars generally homogenous or are they extremely different globally as dirt that make them up don't get to move around very much like the lighter, easily transported dust?

It's just that Serpent from Spirit's days in 2004 keeps coming up whenever I see Rocknest (man I miss the old gal!)

Horizon flattened animated anaglyph GIF of the Sol 58 arm and turret manuevers from hazcam. I left it pretty large (1300x939 pixels, 4MB) so it may not begin to animate till fully downloaded, but I think the large size is worth the wait...



... and for anyone so inclined, here's the even larger 1800 pixel wide Full Resolution Version (7MB)

"109:23:38 Armstrong: I'm at the foot of the ladder. The LM footpads are only depressed in the surface about 1 or 2 inches, although the surface appears to be very, very fine grained, as you get close to it. It's almost like a powder. "

And I've always thought he then said: "Now and then it gets very fine", which I always took to mean total powder (not the garbled transcript on ALSJ), all of which speaks to how fine this stuff can really get. (Yes, I know Luna isn't Mars)

Likely very similar all around Mars, with some hard-to-predict local admixtures. Remember that Mars gets global dust storms and a lot of the dust gets distributed globally.

-the other Doug

Actually, I've discussed this with Eric Jones who compiled the ALSJ, and I'm comfortable with his interpretation that this sentence was "The ground mass is, uh, very fine." This was one of the items on Neil's observation checklist pre-flight, to describe the ground mass, and there is even a recording of Neil during a simulation saying of the sand that had been set up around the ladder on the training unit that "the ground mass is sandy, like beach sand," which of course it was.

Yes, Mars is not Luna, and you get very different erosion processes on a planet that has even a thin atmosphere vs. a moon that has none. In general, there is much greater variation in grain sizes in Martian soils as opposed to lunar soils. On the Moon, you either have very fine dust or rocks from cobbles up to boulders. Because grains in the Martian soil were transported by water (a long time ago) and since by wind, you get much more well-sorted soil fines and a lot of very fine grains deposited by the global dust storms. Add to this the continual impact mixing, and, well Martian soils are far more complex than anything you'd ever find on Luna.

-the other Doug

Actually... that's a parallel/diverge eyes image. Here's a cross-eyed version:

Click to view attachment

It reminds me of this very sharp ribbed footprint on Oceanus Procellarum taken in Nov 1969 on Apollo 12. No water involved.

The LRI web site is very slow at the moment, however:

Apollo 12 boot print low res

High res:

Apollo 12 boot print high res

Two different views of the wheel track. You can push them for a higher resolution version:

MastCam Left:



MastCam Right:

...makes for a nice stereo pairing too, especially zoomed in....

Sol 59 images arriving now. Just a stomp to the left, and a step to the right...

Sol 59 Front Hazcam - looks like they've backed up several meters from the Rocknest drift...

... let's do the dune warp again!
Click to view attachment
I'm a bit dizzy... not sure where the horizon is on that one

The dune in front of MSL now is about half the height of the front wheels (according to my eyes). We know there's solid rock right underneath, while it was quite the opposite at Purgatory.
They know what they're doing.

It's like starting Chapter 2 of a really fantastic novel. I love this!

Dropping in with new images...

Lots of MAHLI activities on sol 60:

Click to view attachment
enlarged animation

Cheers, Udo

It's astonishing for me how fast the data are accessible on earth. It's now 4:40 pm for Curiosity on Mars and the sol 60 images are on earth since a couple of (earth) hours now.
When exactly happens the afternoon Odyssey pass at the landing area ?

Awesome !

Cheers, Udo

It's a little late for this but :
Sol 57 mosaics :



The link is going to my new galery of Curiosity image, totally remade, with a timeline of the events, classified by sols, and each picture is horodated, with a minute precision. I hope you will like it . This give the feeling of the time, I think.

I like the timeline on your web Ant! Definitely worth it!

Damien's (Ant103) much better at seamless stitching of Navcam mosaics than I, but I just had to see this one ASAP.... so here's a quickly stitched anaglyph of the Sol 60 Navcam panorama. Gives a pretty good impression of the lay of things around MSL today. Phil's "sea lions" can be seen in this one too just above and to the right of the RUHF antenna. I'm fascinated by the long "petrified tree" looking formation on the ground in front of them. You can see it even better in the Sol 54 MC100 mosaic. What the heck is that? It looks for all intents and purposes like a fallen log...very strait, very long, and even looks very round...hmmm. Here's a closer look at it.

MAHLI took a shot of the left middle and back wheels after inspecting the undisturbed ripple.
MAHLI sol 60 image
Lots of small dents and scratches.

Just caught scott's tweet saying the image above was to check if the mid wheel had been raised which would have made scooping an unstable process.

I'd say it's likely a flatish slab viewed end on, rather than a cyllinder. The "sea lions" probably are more slab-like than they look too.