Spirit & Opportunity *5* - Let's start with new NASA conference!

SBird · 2004-03-30 11:26:26

If it's pointing at the sun, that explains the image. The MI probably cant go to infinity focus, causing the blurriness of the image. Strange that they'd be using the MI for this measurement, though.

chaosman · 2004-03-30 14:49:53

"Which brings me to a puzzling observation: The lack of rocks at Eagle crater and its general area."

Interesting. That question did come to my mind suddenly yesterday, too.

I have no explanation....

any geologists ?

atomoid · 2004-03-30 18:33:18

Apparently, NASA says that the [http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/2M1336 … 1.JPG.html]MI images with the dark bloody enamel is just part of the rind of the rock that hasnt been RATed away yet, i guess the dark color merely owes to contrast gamut in the imaging technique since this rock was, as they paradoxically note: of a "lighter tone" (or maybe the light tone is merely due to a dust covering on the rind?)... Here's more from the [http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/ … 0330a.html]March 30th press release:

Because Mazatzal's surface was not even, the left half of the rock was penetrated more deeply than the right. As can be seen in this image, the right, darker portion of the rock is still covered by the rind material. Spirit completed a second grind at this location at a different angle to remove the remaining veneer from the right side and create an even deeper hole. Images of this second grind will be sent back to Earth in the next sol or two.

But they seem to get the left/right sides mixed up, im going on the dark/light part of the description here...

SohoBoy · 2004-03-31 02:41:56

Apparently, NASA says that the [http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/2M1336 … 1.JPG.html]MI images with the dark bloody enamel is just part of the rind of the rock that hasnt been RATed away yet....

Why does the 'dark rind' appear utterly homogeneous? ie no sign of any surface weathering textures as seen on other rocks e.g. Adirondack.

It looks 'waxy' like a very thin layer of ashphalt. From the outer appearance of the rock we could be grinding into a sedimentary exactly at right angles to the bedding planes

[http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/2M1339 … 1.JPG.html]latest microphotos as of this post

Stu · 2004-03-31 13:15:32

Starting to see details on the Columbia Hills now...

[http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/2P1339 … 1.JPG.html]http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/2P1339 … 1.JPG.html

Let's get over there!!

Julius Caeser · 2004-03-31 13:32:43

Those Columbia hills seem to be navigable!

Palomar · 2004-03-31 14:10:30

Starting to see details on the Columbia Hills now...
[http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/2P1339 … 1.JPG.html]http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/2P1339 … 1.JPG.html
Let's get over there!!

*Very nice. Creates a wistful, yearning feeling in me. I'd love to be walking towards them, right now.

--Cindy

::EDIT:: Looks to me like the boulders/rocks population thins quite a bit throughout the central portion of the (larger) pic.

GraemeSkinner · 2004-04-01 01:33:02

I think spirit is now creating [http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/ … 99L5M1.JPG]rock art
Just think, if a sudden dust storm covers these ratted rocks in a few months time, then a couple of hundred years go by until the rocks are uncovered. How would someone explain away the marks if they did not know of the rovers existence.

atomoid · 2004-04-01 04:49:21

I think spirit is now creating [http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/ … 99L5M1.JPG]rock art
Just think, if a sudden dust storm covers these ratted rocks in a few months time, then a couple of hundred years go by until the rocks are uncovered. How would someone explain away the marks if they did not know of the rovers existence.

wow, and what about all those letters and things like [http://www.freewebs.com/atomoid/theW.jpg]the "W" and stuff that we were seeing on the rocks, maybe ancient Atlantan or Venusan probes scratched those and were seeing them today after a billion years... and what ever happened to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_rock]art rock anyway? theres not much on the radio these days other than sound bite pop rocks...

Personally, i think just 163 years from now, after personal space elevators, quantum interference bio-computers, free clean limitless energy, prosthetic brain transplants, and all sociopolitical problems are solved (as long as self-replicating nuclear robots dont go berzerk and destroy civilization), then a museum with a secure observation dome will have been constructed over the Eagle crater landing site and tourists will be paying upwards of 1200 units of Schnaerbski to start out at the lander and walk the carefully constructed raised pathway that traces out along Opportunity's path all the way to another much larger dome over Endurance crater where the fossilized remains of martian skeletons were first seen eroding from a layer boundary partway up the wall of the crater.

Shaun Barrett · 2004-04-01 07:57:10

A few words about the mysterious blueberries.
I was wondering about their size and their almost perfect shape, too, just like most of us here. I'd researched terrestrial 'concretions' at geological sites on Google but couldn't find pictures of Earthly spherules which looked anything like the martian ones.
I, too, was tempted to assume they might be biological in origin since they seemed so uniform.

However, while reading the latest edition of New Scientist magazine today, I learned of some of the goings-on at this year's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference at NASA-JSC. Apparently, the announcement that the blueberries are haematite concretions formed in mineral-rich water flowing through loose sediment, came as no surprise at all to geologists who presented their findings from fieldwork in the Navajo sandstone formations of Utah.
The article stated: "They showed samples of perfect spherules virtually identical in size, appearance and, it turns out, composition to those Opportunity found littering the floor of the 22-metre-wide crater where it has spent the past two months."

Nobody seems to have suggested that biology is required in any way whatsoever to form these spherules on Earth or, by extension I presume, on Mars either. Here on Earth, all it took was very salty mineral-rich and highly acidic water flowing through the Utah soil.

Now that I know martian haematite blueberries have identical terrestrial cousins, which can be explained without biology, I'm much happier to conclude the martian spherules aren't fossils.

That's not to say I've given up hope of the MERs finding a fossil before their missions end, though I know it would have to be a hugely serendipitous event. We're told over and over again that an alien Exploration Rover landing here on Earth, with the same equipment as Spirit and Opportunity, would be extremely unlikely to find a fossil in any average pile of rocks or dirt.
But then, what if we've accidentally landed in the martian version of Dinosaur National Park?!!

Rxke · 2004-04-01 11:18:52

Thanks Shaun, that was exactly wat I was looking for!

(Although it would be extremely nice if someone came up WHY they form in a homogene size, i'm somewhat less puzzled now...)

cassioli · 2004-04-01 13:12:18

What the hell is there, under the red dust?!?
imagery]
([http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery]zoom)

Blue glass?!? Blue marble?!?!? Can you see the strange light reflection? :hm: I remember we saw the image of a blueberry cut in half by the RAT (sorry, can't remember the link),and it appeared quire similar to that material: maybe blueberries are pieces of that blue rocks (maybe other blue rocks are hidden by red dust), eroded by flowing water?

Very strange, very interesting, very nice... gosh! )

Luca

cassioli · 2004-04-01 13:25:01

This is the image I am referring to:

[http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/1M1308 … 59M2M1.JPG](zoom)

But I remember a color version of this, although it is a microscope imagery; does anybody remember it?

Julius Caeser · 2004-04-01 14:05:10

According to Nasa,Mazaztal is a basaltic rock like most rocks examined at the gusev site.Prolly the green colour is olivine!Like in the case of Humphrey,there seems to be evidence of alteration of the rock with passage of minute quantities of water.Some kind of mineral salts could be traced in the fracture line inside this rock which is clearly visible in the MI image.The presence of olivine excludes this rock to have been formed in a watery environment as in the case at Meridiani.The water interaction with the rock must have taken place after its formation,otherwise the olivine would have been altered.What i'm really puzzled about is the fact that ,theres this one rock at Meridiani:Bounce..cant explain how it got there and its place inside the story of Meridiani site!Is it possible that the minerals found along the fracture line inside Mazaztal at Gusev be attributed to microbial activity combined with ground water seepage thru the rock or just water acting alone?!!

cassioli · 2004-04-01 14:15:17

I can't find again the color microscope image, so I build it by myself:

[http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/1M1308 … 59M2M1.JPG]Original b/n

[http://www.lyle.org/mars/bysol/1-037.html]Original RGB

[http://jumpjack.altervista.org/immagini/section-bn.JPG]b/n detail

[http://jumpjack.altervista.org/immagini … -color.jpg]color detail

Mix:

Maybe the dark "stripes" inside the blueberries are the tipical "stripes" you can see into marble on Earth, and in that strange blue-rock on mars.

Eart's marble sample:

BTW... how many people would see an "artifact" in a similar rock, if the photo came from Mars rather than Earth?

Luca

RobS · 2004-04-01 14:17:17

Basalt typically is a very dark rock, and I suspect if the color isn't balanced quite right it can look a bit bluish. Remember that the light falling on the rock is red, too, because of the dust in the air, and the redness of the light varies hour by hour and day by day as the amount of dust in the air varies. Thus makes "true color" pictures more of an approximation than you might think.

This reminds me of an amusing story from the Viking days (I was a lowly graduate student assigned to the lander in 1976): the first picture to come back from the Martian surface was color balanced by hand because in those days there were fewer, less powerful computers available. The balanced picture showed a reddish surface, but the sky was blue! Then they did more research and figured out the sky wasn't blue, so they issued a correction. Too late; many US newspapers had printed the picture with the blue sky on the front page (of course, not so many newspapers used color then). In Japan they heard of the problem in time to correct it, but they couldn't get the corrected picture (no email in those days) so the newspaper's photo lab reshot the picture they had through a red filter! The Asahi Shinbun newspaper donated a thousand or two offprints of the front page with the picture to JPL, and I probably still have one somewhere at home to this day.

-- RobS

atomoid · 2004-04-01 14:23:15

A few words about the mysterious blueberries.
...the blueberries are haematite concretions formed in mineral-rich water flowing through loose sediment..."They showed samples of perfect spherules virtually identical in size, appearance and, it turns out, composition to those Opportunity found littering the floor of the 22-metre-wide crater where it has spent the past two months."
...all it took was very salty mineral-rich and highly acidic water flowing through the Utah soil...

New scientist doesnt have the article online. Was there any reference to the "Stalks" or "dimples" like those seen so often by Opportunity?

The spherules themselves i believe are completely geological, i dont really buy into the "potato roots" life theory of the stalks and dimples that someone here suggested (even though i really think its a very interesting idea!).

Early on in the mission, I was thinking the spherules would prove to be tectites, due to the dimples (vessicles left over froom venting gas), an idea to which i was supremely disheartened by since it seemed to effectively cast the landing site as a baren life-less wasteland. But from what i have heard, concretions don't form dimples, so I was at the same time very excited and puzzled by the determination that they were concretions (eureka! water!), deepening the geological (arelogical?) story to be teased out of the area.

However puzzling as this is (and I love it how Mars keeps throwing curve balls at us), my initial guess is that the spherules underwent repeated series of soaking and drying out which caused mineral migration from inside and outside the spherules, this would probably tend to form a singular area weakness "dimple" from mineral-laden leaching entering and leaving a hardened area downstream of the leach flow which could be fossilized as the "stalk".

has anyone heard any explanations of the "stalk" and "dimple" features?

atomoid · 2004-04-01 14:35:24

...What i'm really puzzled about is the fact that ,theres this one rock at Meridiani:Bounce..cant explain how it got there and its place inside the story of Meridiani site!

Im running with the idea that Bounce is an iceberg carry and drop-off, otherwise wed see lots of rocks left around from the crater impacts.

Dust isnt settling on this area (do we know this for sure? if dust is piling up, there shouldnt be any spherules on the surface, it shoudl be all dust drifts.) and covering things up, so this rock must post-date the craters.

Therefore, the craters pre-date the sediments since all the impact ejecta was probably buried beneath the sediment. Many eons and an ocean later, we have lots of sediment and a few lonely rocks being dropped at odd places by icebergs traveling downstream, Bounce only coincidentally happens to be near a crater. IF there was a lot of glacial activity we shoudl see some eveidence of that in the nearby higher altitude terrain, and indeed MEridianni has lots of weird sculpted terrain, but you'd ask a glaciologist on that.

An alternative to this scenario is that the area has deep, deep sediment and even Endurance crater impact couldnt punch deep enough to throw any basaltic rocks around, all the ejecta chunks of sediments, being pretty silty and weakly cohesive in composition (is this incorrect characterization? do we know the hardness of this stuff?) has relatively quickly dissolved and blown away (im waiting to see if the white dust drifts on the downwind side of the crater turn out to be dissolved bedrock dust), leaving only spherules and pebbles behind.

Shaun Barrett · 2004-04-01 19:46:01

Hi Atomoid!
No, there was no reference to the dimpling or the stalks on the martian blueberries in the New Scientist article I mentioned.
Incidentally, I like the ideas being put forward here about the timeline of events at Meridiani. I still don't have a clear sequence in mind that I'm satisfied with but I can see some logic in the notion that the sedimentation occurred after the impacts.
It would be so much easier, though, if we could put a geologist down on the surface and actually date some rocks. In fact, I'm reasonably sure the crater-counting method of dating planetary surfaces, developed during the lunar exploration era, is misleading us at Mars. I have a feeling Mars' history is too complicated for the basic 'more craters equals older surface' tenet. For this reason, dating the rocks there is of paramount importance in allowing the science of geology on Mars to proceed out of today's welter of conflicting hypotheses.

I have read reports in years gone by that a region of the martian surface, comparable in area to that of the U.S.A. and stretching from the eastern end of Mariner Valley north-eastward to the edge of Vastitas Borealis, has had at least a kilometre of its superficial layers removed by water erosion. Opportunity's area of haematite lies within that region.
The appearance of the region on a topographical colour-coded globe of Mars which sits on my shelf looks distinctly like it has been 'smeared' and smoothed by water, like a sandcastle washed over by waves. In fact, large areas of that globe show similar evidence that the whole planet was awash with water at some stage (or stages) in its past.

It really hasn't surprised me at all that Opportunity is sitting on the bed of an ancient dried-up sea. What has surprised me is how quickly and easily the lander was able to confirm the fact. What extraordinary luck that we happened to land right next to an exposed bed of sedimentary rock!

The fallout from all this new data will be filling books for years. Mars is giving up its secrets, one by one, and now we even have unequivocal evidence of methane in the atmosphere. These are deliriously exciting times for Marsophiles!
:up:

chaosman · 2004-04-01 23:49:19

"What the hell is there, under the red dust of 'Mazatzal'?!?"

Good question ..

There is a coating rich in chlorine ans sulfate:

[http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/ … 7R1_br.jpg]http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery...._br.jpg

There are at least two layers inside the coating

( see [http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/ … 0401a.html]http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/ … 0401a.html )

Below that coating is basalt.

NASA:
"Its outer coating or rind, on the other hand, appears to be of a different constitution. Scientists are still puzzling out the implications of these data."

Any ideas about the coating ?

atomoid · 2004-04-02 03:51:25

"What the hell is there, under the red dust of 'Mazatzal'?!?"
Any ideas about the coating ?

more... (of the same i guess)
Mazatzal is a highly coated rock, containing at least four "cake layers": a top coat of dust, a pinking coating, a dark rind and its true interior. top to bottom:

1 - outer layer: dust coat [think tank says: blows around and sticks to everything and obfuscates the spectra! get rid of it!]

2 - "pinking coating" [think tank says: "whatever that is" is this like the "pinking" on spark plugs when timing is off which i think is due to oxygen reduction? no idea]

3 - a dark rind: appears to be of a different chemical composition than the previously studied rocks ("Adirondack and "Humphrey"). [drunk tank says: underwater undersoil acid reaction with mineralization, or formed by dust/frost/UV reaction?]

4 - interior is basalt: approximately the same quantities of magnesium oxide and sulfur tri-oxide as other basalt rocks in the Gusev Crater area [im not as think as you drunk i am tank says: move along, nothing here to see, move along...]

...puzzling out the implications... :rant: indeed.
"These are deliriously exciting times for Marsophiles!" (thx Shaun) indeed!

cassioli · 2004-04-02 10:46:57

Take a look at this post of mine:
[http://www.newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1450]3d mars without glasses

Luca

atomoid · 2004-04-02 21:21:06

...sometimes its interesting to look back at [http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey … 0605a.html]old news articles.

"We have seen layers, each with dramatically different physical properties, in places like Terra Meridiani," Christensen said. "Why do the physical properties in the different layers change? They change because the environment in which those rocks were deposited changed.

Rxke · 2004-04-06 00:51:48

Wonder what [http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/1N1344 … 1.JPG.html]this is... You can see it is very bright, and not because of a random reflection, it's on the previous pics too...

(EDIT) The bright spot has been surprisingly named... "Bright Spot" by the mission controllers. Guess inspiration was running a bit low!

Rxke · 2004-04-06 01:15:22

And [http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/1P1344 … 1.JPG.html]this... looks like some outcroppings, like on the 'initial' crater wall Opp visited... wonder if they will take a closer look, nevermid that shiny dot in previous post, these horizontal rocks look much more interesting!

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