It is late summer in the Southern hemisphere, so the Sun is low in the sky and subtle topography is accentuated in orbital images.
We see many shallow pits in the bright residual cap of carbon dioxide ice (also called “Swiss cheese terrain”). There is also a deeper, circular formation that penetrates through the ice and dust. This might be an impact crater or it could be a collapse pit. [More at link]
Sol 4743, May 28, 2017. Sitting on the northern edge of Perseverance Valley, Opportunity has been using the Pancam to image the landscape to profile the head of the valley and its upper reaches. This north-looking composite (false color by Holger Isenberg) shows the south face of Cape Tribulation and the rover’s tracks as it descended. Click to enlarge it.
Opportunity raw images, its latest mission status, location map, and atmospheric opacity, known as tau.
Lighter-toned bedrock that surrounds fractures and comprises high concentrations of silica — called “halos”— has been found in Gale crater on Mars, indicating that the planet had liquid water much longer than previously believed. The new finding is reported in a new paper published [May 30, 2017] in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
“The concentration of silica is very high at the centerlines of these halos,” said Jens Frydenvang, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Copenhagen and lead author of the new study. “What we’re seeing is that silica appears to have migrated between very old sedimentary bedrock and into younger overlying rocks. The goal of NASA’s Curiosity rover mission has been to find out if Mars was ever habitable, and it has been very successful in showing that Gale crater once held a lake with water that we would even have been able to drink, but we still don’t know how long this habitable environment endured.
“What this finding tells us is that, even when the lake eventually evaporated, substantial amounts of groundwater were present for much longer than we previously thought—thus further expanding the window for when life might have existed on Mars.”
Whether this groundwater could have sustained life remains to be seen. But this new study buttresses recent findings by another Los Alamos scientist who found boron on Mars for the first time, which also indicates the potential for long-term habitable groundwater in the planet’s past. [More at links]
Sol 1709-11, May 26, 2017, update by MSL scientist
Just 20 sols ago we passed the northern vernal equinox, but the rover is ‘down under’ (at 4 degrees south latitude), so we’ve just started the fall season. For those readers in the Earth’s northern hemisphere, it’s like about October 1 on Earth. Over the next half of a Mars year (or nearly one Earth year) the rover will have a little less power for driving, arm deployment, and instrument activities as it spends a little more energy keeping itself warm. The body of the rover is kept warm by a fluid loop that distributes heat from the radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) to the rover body, but the extremities (arm, wheels, and mast) need to be heated electrically. As a result, the rover will take one day to recharge its battery this weekend. It’s a holiday weekend in the US and much of Europe, so why shouldn’t Curiosity have a day off too? [More at link]
THEMIS Image of the Day, May 30, 2017. Today’s false color images shows part of the large ridge on the floor of Newton Crater in Terra Sirenum.
The THEMIS VIS camera contains 5 filters. The data from different filters can be combined in multiple ways to create a false color image. These false color images may reveal subtle variations of the surface not easily identified in a single band image.
More THEMIS Images of the Day by geological topic.
THEMIS Image of the Day, May 26, 2017. Today’s false color image shows part of the plains and craters of Terra Sirenum. This long scan (see full size image at link) was taken not long after local sunrise.
The THEMIS VIS camera contains 5 filters. The data from different filters can be combined in multiple ways to create a false color image. These false color images may reveal subtle variations of the surface not easily identified in a single band image.
More THEMIS Images of the Day by geological topic.
This oblique view shows a small part of the near-rim ejecta from Tooting Crater. The flow extending from upper left to lower right looks much like a typical lava flow, but doesn’t emanate from a volcanic vent.
Instead, this must be either melted rock from the impact event, or a wet debris flow from melting of ice. The surface is dusty so color variations are minor. [More at link]
Sol 1705, May 24, 2017. The Mastcam’s 34mm lens took a five-frame pan showing part of Vera Rubin Ridge. At right, massive weathering over untold numbers of years has reduced these Murray Formation rock layers and veins to ragged shreds; Mastcam 100mm composite (6 MB). Click either image to enlarge it.
Sol 1705 raw images (from all cameras), and Curiosity’s latest location.
The rim of Verlaine Crater. This entire scene is actually along the rim of the crater, which is much, much larger than what HiRISE can capture in one image.
Beautiful Mars series.
