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A mission-killer if you hit some rocks on the way down, but if you make it, the MERs are so slow compared to how much there is to see here, even a yearlong tour could only scratch the surface. Now that weve learned the vulnerabilities of the MER platform, fix the wheels, slap in an RTG and crank up the motor speed!

I've always wondered about those dark areas so prevalent in many images, such as near the lower part of this image. I'm guessing the dark areas are basalt sand, and of larger particle size than the lighter dusty finer stuff so it tends to stay in the same area. I think this situation is similar to Meridiani, but here the chaotic terrain allows more of it to erode and inundate most of the dark area, whereas at Meridiani, theres not much terrain left to erode so its more localized around the exposed sedimentary deposits. The older basalts are below the lighter and newer sedimentary layers so these dark areas reveal lower elevations imitating water pooling up.

But still, its odd that there are these little isolated oasises of dark sand when you can look to other areas that look similar terrain but for some reason dont have any dark sand. I would expect the lighter stuff to pretty much cover over eveything by now given the wind is the only real disperser of soils, or at least for the dark areas to be more evenly peppered in or mixed according to the terrain features, but there seems to be a large contrast of these areas that is quite puzzling. Are they just covered over? or does some wind process tend to actively separate them in certain areas?

The elevation seems quite exaggerated in these "reconstructions". note that the captions on http://www.esa.int/export/SPECIALS/Mars … bhead6]all those images say "This close-up perspective view was calculated from the digital terrain model derived from the stereo channels." anyone know if the rendering represents the "true" elevation, or if its exaggerated for illustrative/aesthetic purposes?

Shaun, about the wet mud and red dust. I tend to think that the dark stuff is actually the red dust, or maybe just dark dust like the images of the dark stuff that gets blown out of cracks and craters linked in other posts recently, but its so hard to tell true colors on Mars anyway, these mars express image colors seem sort of "rendered", it just seems too "normalized" or something(!). i tend to think its not "wet" since there isnt much "recent" terrain modifcation and erosion that would seem to imply, since the geological conditions would remain the same for so long and water, being the most volatile element on mars would impart a relatively huge influence in modifying the terrain if it were there by freezing/sublimation/melting/expaning/contracting/dissolving/depositing/flowing/aggregating... well, wind action would do a lot of shaping also, and maybe would cover up or modify any such water affects, but then i get thinking cold brine tables might not actually have much effect on the terrain in the first place if they dont act like fresh water... i tend to have second thought about everything when it comes to figuring out mars, since i dont really know what im talking about either!

and the flow]http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/dust_obscured_martian_landscape.html?12102004]"flow" in the crater in the next post, yep, those have always mystified me, nasa likes to explain them away without further inquiry as "dust avalanches" hmmm, it seems a sensible explanation, but you raise an interesting point, that would seem to suggest nasa would say that the dark floor is either "ruffled dust" like an avalanche or is different material than the "flow" feature itself that somehow end up looking the same color... neither of these explanation seems right. mystery remains.

Doug-
yep, it often seems to take failure to insure success, the MPL failure gave NASA the excuse to really put a lot of care (money) for the design and testing into making sure the MERs would work since they couldnt afford another PR fiasco. I believe thats the main empetus behind NASA's descision to fund two MERs, for redundancy, otherwise we'd have only one poking around there now.

Ad Astra-
Im assuming NASA never looked again after getting the NIMA report that they had ostensibly found the MPL. Apparently, they do hope to eventually check again using the MRO. Here's a http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/ma … rprisingly recent article on the matter although i still havent found any of those NIMA-processed images even though they are apparently "unclassified".

Beagle was cheap like Mars Polar Lander, and probably wasnt able to send data during touchdown.? Similarly, MPL was never found and neither were the two impactor probes it flew with, even though they searched and it should be showing up about as clear as the MERs do. If we only knew exactly where to look, then we might be able to see all the other failed mars missions over the last several decades lying in shiny heaps at the bottom of small impact craters. They did find http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/01/04/]Viking1 and pathfinder since they had some good data on where to look.

It could also have landed softly but had some other fatal problem, so there might not be any large sitzmark and its just sitting there without any power or <enter your BeagleII failure scenario here>.

It could take many many targeting cycles for MOC to chance upon the precise spot it might be, and we just havent combed enough square mileage to find it yet. http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/01/04/]The article describes the method for finding landers from orbit and says it would take about 60 years to comb the entire landing ellipse to find MPL... ug, now that tries my patience...!  One can only wonder how long it would take to find BeagleII, though i assume we have better data on its location than we had with MPL...

theres a pretty good and relatively recent (2000) pdf paper by John McGowan on http://www.jmcgowan.com/oilmars.pdf]oil and natural gas on Mars
he also talks about the need for a trace gas sensor
if you dont like the slide format, http://www.jmcgowan.com/mars_reprint.PDF]you might find this one a bit more readable

and i remember hearing about how they thought the lunar lander and the astronauts would sink into the moon'd dust like quicksand. but that didnt happen, even though there is very little gravity to pack the lunar dust.  i also remember reading Clarke's 'A Fall of Moondust' about a lunar tour ship that sinks below the lunar surface after a subsurface bubble pops and swallows it up...

but i still dont know why the moon dust soil is packed as well as it is in the low gravity, you'd expect the grains to be precariously perched atop each other due to friction and irregular grain size much like a house of cards just waiting for some weight to crush it down. its probably much looser packed than earth soil but the fact that the astronauts didnt sink could be due to just the low gravity making them so lightweight coudl it? maybe it has to do more with the immense amount of time available for grain packing due to moonquakes and impact vibrations settling the grains into packed state... ?

Doug, the "bad guide" doeth much good! 
thanks, but you know how answers just raise questions..!

Seems similar to a desktop computer scanner... however, this has me wondering about the lens system... and lo and behold http://www.msss.com/camera_info/moc.html]heres a breathtaking shot of still another example of Shaun's "dark pools of liquid water" on the MOC camera page no doubt, the one that i browsed to in trying to answer this very question... and indeed, not to get too off topic but we certainly need to send a rover to Schiaparelli country, if not for the science then certainly for the vistas we'd get! but anyway now, back to the scan-cam, i cant find whether the lens is spheroid or columnar, i'd supspect that a linear CCD pickup would require a linear rod-like lens system but all i see is a normal round camera nozzle on MOC, so im hoping to find an MOC exploded-view diagram but so far no luck.

Also, about the CPROTO method for increasing the image data in the scan direction, it seems apparent that the normal integration time per line "exposure" is very carefully timed to create square pixels while not overlapping or omitting terrain, so for example with the 700 meters vs. 2.1 km pushbroom aquisition, you end up with a 3:1 aspect ratio per pixel, not that thats bad, you merely process the image by squishing it for display on square-pixeled monitors, so really, when we look at the MOC images across the small 2048 pixel dimension that cant benefit of the CPROTO method, theres much less data there than one might assume given that were accustomed to seeing images aquired in square pixels, i tend to think that (at least at the pixel limit) this might distort the appearance of tiny features somewhat. although the problem is small, after all, you could always 'throw out' 2/3 of those pixels and end up with a 'normalized' image 'true-square' image to compare perceptions with... or maybe im just offtrack in my own perceptual thinking...

- Side note: the MRO apparently has 2048x128 CCDs according to http://marsoweb.nas.nasa.gov/HiRISE/ins … onents]the HiRISE site im guessing its a similar scan method, with somewhat similar 'exposure', er um, "integration" methods.

djellison,
Thanks for the great map, i guess opp will be going slower because of the dusty solar panels as well, so your probably right about MArch, even into June i think might be the case if theres a lot (hopefully!) to check out along the way...

Were you the one who initially gave that link (that i cant find) to the searchable image database? if so can you repost it? You probably have a far better method of finding the right images than i do (i just hunt and get frustrated). I want to find more context of the map you just made for us to see 'further back'. im interested in its proximity to the aformentioned Meridianna 'etched terrain'... thx!

Yep, doesnt look very good for keeping an atmosphere around without any method to resupply it. but 35 meters, although huge, still amounts to just a drop in the proverbial bucket, -er shotglass you might say. I tend to asume that Mars had similar amounts of water as the Earth when it formed.

Thats pretty much the clincher, Mars doesnt seem to have any way to resupply the gasses to the atmosphere by itself: no plate tectonics, little volcanism, its too cold to get much water vapor build-up. And no (prolific at least) life processes to alter chemicals into gasses en masse . So it just cools off and dries up like leftovers in the freezer, but theres still plenty of ice there, slowly being liberated from under the surface as it is eroded over the eons.

If we mechanically and biogenetically provide the means, I'd assume that theres plenty of raw materials and water abundant enough to keep the atmosphere as thick as necessary for the forseeable future.

not to beat a dead horse, but i just noticed this http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/200 … x.html]The MGS MOC Search for Beagle 2

Note that this picture is NOT the "Beagle impact crater":

then why did i link it? i dont know, it had me fooled until i read the story!

those two "gullies" one of them almost looks like its forked near the bottom, but if you look close its not connected, im thinking these arent gullies carved by geyser or springs, since they seem to be too high on the ridge, not water table coudl exist that high. maybe these are just faults due to subsidence of the soil here. but who knows why just in this one spot? or perhaps most likely they are gullies like the ones in the craters weve seen so far, formed underneath an insulating icepack by melting snow that has long since dwindled away. the "forked" one might reveal a place where the water tunneled under the ground and reemerged. mysterious...

oh how i wish our species would stop throwing so much money away at fruitless wars and the paranoia-industrial complex, and just pass a tiny fraction of that to take space exploration more seriously, we could send a dozen or more MER clones at every launch window to new and challenging hold-your-breath-and-hope-we-make-it kinds of places rather than the flat plains were relegated to, just for the slim chance of actually getting one though to check out some very good stuff close up, i bet we'd make it more often than not... okay ill step down from my soap box now

as far as I know, opportunity is still just sittin there waiting for conjunction to pass, the panos they released i think are are old data from before it went into the crater, i guess theyre just putting *something* out there to keep us entertained whiel we wait...?

http://realserver1.jpl.nasa.gov:8080/ra … ompact]the latest video "update" said Opprtunity rebooted because it "overflew!" a buffer