ZOMG
We're actually backtracking?!?! What have they done with Ken Farley - has he been kidnapped?? He'd never stand for actually going back and deviating from the Mission Plan...
SpecialSetOfSieves
joined 9 months ago
... because the overhangs, and all the holes among these many boulders, would make me nervous if I was roving the slopes of this giant crater rim. We know that Percy is a very determined astro-droid, but there are too many places for tech scavengers to hide around here. Although I guess they would have to be pretty small jawas...
Link to full Mastcam-Z frame
One pill makes you larger
and one pill makes you small
and the ones that Mother gives you
Don't do anything at all
When lost on another planet, our little green friend reminds us: Remember your training. Save you it can.
I'm not surprised that Mars Guy is going back to the textbook, so to speak, because we just don't have experience with a geologic setting quite like this - the moderately well-preserved rim of a ~50 km-diameter impact crater - from prior Mars exploration or Apollo (Earth, of course, has done a lousy job of preserving craters of this size). The closest example is Opportunity's exploration of Endeavour Crater, which is much smaller, with a far smoother, more degraded rim. Apollo 15 landed near the edge of the Apennine Mountains, formed by the immense Imbrium basin impact (~1100 km diameter), but the astronauts didn't have the chance to ascend the foothills to any great height during their short and very busy stay. Opportunity had access to extensive outcroppings of bedrock at Endeavour, not to mention the kind of smooth, light-toned "paver stones" that Curiosity and Perseverance have been driving over for years. The Apollo astronauts saw nothing of the kind, unsurprisingly - the Moon being completely blanketed by that powdery surface.
Those other landing sites feature nothing quite like the distinct, boulder-studded knolls and ridges that Percy is investigating, which seem related to the original crater formation process itself. These gentle hills roughly follow the regional SW to NE trend of the rim mountain Percy is climbing (zoom in just a bit on the ESA map to see the steep face of the spur north of the rover), and several feature intact, massive blocks of bedrock that I'd love to sample (see Paul Hammond's Pico Turquino post for the best example yet). Good episode by Mars Guy, and I can't disagree with him here for the most part, but believe me, he isn't laying the hardcore stuff on us yet: impact crater geology melts brains, not just rocks!
All of the above vignettes were cropped from Front Hazcam images taken on Sol 1308, at about 1 PM local time.
Given that the sun was roughly behind the camera and rover when these images were captured, the complex, light-toned surfaces of these rocks stands out, with glinting reflective patches evident, especially toward the top of the hill. I'd be intrigued to view these rocks in the late afternoon, when shadows are longer and the dusty skies of late winter aren't layering that soft sheen over everything. Given the aggressive driving schedule that the rover team has adopted for climbing the Jezero rim, though, I'm not sure that Percy will stop here for very long...
I'm afraid I can't upvote this sentiment, Paul. I feel like we need to get you to, I don't know, the Atacama? Utah, Kazakhstan, Western Australia? Nunavut, or the Dry Valleys? OK, all those places are a bit much on the oxygen and the humidity, and you wouldn't be tasting the grit and dust in your mouth, but surely they could provide some respite to weary Martians? Dear planetary science community: remember the Paul Hammonds of this world as you work! We're not mathematicians or pure theorists - planets fully engage the senses, and some people have been waiting a long time!
(TBH, I really go back and forth on the wisdom of sending astronauts ASAP, as certain incautious parties advocate. We should have done one sample return mission already - the easiest and arguably most relevant to astronaut safety was unwisely cancelled by NASA and has never been revisited, for reasons I can't understand - and I long to get those cores from the Jezero basin back. I'd really give up a lot to have them, and I often think it'd be irresponsible to send people before we've assessed the toxicity of the regolith and dust. Still, the 1960s show me how important it is to have urgency, too. I'm assuming it was incredible fun to watch the entire lunar program evolve out of nothing, and even the Voyagers launched when they did to hit a deadline. I can't imagine where this science would be without Apollo or Voyager!)
Are we really passing up all those tasty-textured boulders on the hill??
Come on, rover team! If you won't give Percy the pleasure, send me! I'll core those rocks for free. We really need astrogeologist boots on the ground...
This shot was taken by the arm-mounted WATSON camera at 10:46 PM local time, illuminated by the LED (see also shots lit from the left and right, for perspective). The boulder Percy is analyzing (see here for a daylight view) isn't as reflective as some near the rover, but then again, this part of the Jezero rim seems to have more than enough funky rock coatings for anyone!
Thanks for posting these. Do you prefer this JPL version of the overhead view to the contour-lined ESA one?
You mean you didn't manage to get all your wheels dragged through slippery mud, or get sand sliding up and down your back for months at a time?
...
No wonder Percy hasn't proven the case for biology yet. It's too damned organic and sexy as it is. No witness tube can help the rover escape its own hot signal. That bot is living its best life!
You mean "notional path to the SSW", Paul, no?
I can't find any evidence that the triangular-prismatic rock at the top centre of this image even existed before Sol 1292 (apparently visible on the left hump on the horizon in this image)... are the Martians watching us???
(To be clear, I am joking here. I just think it's really neat to see how many of these cobble and boulder-studded slopes on the Jezero rim produce these angular and seemingly resistant forms. Martian hills and mountains are pretty rounded in general - I'd hardly expect to find the Matterhorn in these ancient landscapes - but erosion has a way of surprising you in this place...
STOP STOP I'M GETTING A NOSEBLEED
(OK, I know Opportunity was a lot higher up in elevation. But that's not a fair comparison - "Oppy" was born lucky and everybody knows it. The wind was always at that rover's back and it never had to land in a 1500 km-wide hole punched out of the highlands...)
While I'm being chatty, I'd like to ask you if you have any suggestions re: contributions to this community or instance or whatever we call it. I often see things in the raw images that I feel like pointing out here. In reading social media since this mission started, though, I see vast knowledge gaps in people's understanding of basic geology (or "earth sciences", if we can use that term for Mars - maybe "environmental sciences" is a better term), and I sometimes feel I should try to shine a light in those gaps. I've thought about breaking down some of the big science papers/results from this mission here, but I wanted to ask you about this first, as I think you have a better feel than I for what people might be interested in actually reading.
No, I'm not calling this a "potential biosignature" 😆
Mars Guy has documented some of the rover team's prior work on coated rocks, although I don't remember seeing any examples this visually striking.
The coated rocks which have been documented prior to this one - none of which were nearly so patchy as this one, if I recall correctly - have been interpreted as a relatively thick dust coating formed by the action of water vapor, i.e. humidity. Mars should have had some fairly recent episodes of higher atmospheric moisture caused by the tilting of Mars' axis, which would expose the polar caps to more sunlight and temporarily humidify the atmosphere while the ice is being redistributed to the new polar latitudes.
We've never had any mission climb the rim of a crater as large as Jezero before... not on Mars, or even on Luna... I'd say it's been pretty fun so far!
I have seen thousands upon thousands of still frames from the MER, MSL and Mars 2020 missions, but very few that take the perspective seen above. I find it practical and useful for the following reasons:
- Seeing exactly which clasts and sand ripples have been in contact with the rover (notice the pebbles and cobbles that have been pushed into sand, exposing darker material). The rover's tracks aren't always evident, and this helps.
- We can easily see the state of the wheels
- We get instant perspective on the size of surface features
- We can observe sedimentation on the rover (how much sand/dust is coating it) through time
However...
Shots like this are just really cool. People already anthropomorphize rovers (and Ingenuity), because we like seeing ourselves on other worlds by proxy. People also like monster trucks, mudbogging, ATVs, and just plain getting dirty. Mars is known for being cold and arid, but the truth is, barring any possible toxins in the soil or dust, it's really a place for big kids! Geologists aren't the only ones who like to play in the rocks. There's a whole culture out there that likes to put metal to dirt or hard stone, and I don't feel like we reach them enough. More of these, please!
After reporting a while back that the SHERLOC instrument was inoperable due to a stuck, half-open dust cover, it seems that we're back in business, based on the latest images from Sol 1076 (29 Feb 2024).
I'm not sure if the engineering team will decide to leave the dust cover open, but I do know that the science team could really, really use SHERLOC, which can (and has) identified organic molecules in the rocks, including the samples we've collected. With Ingenuity losing its "wings", we can all use good news from Jezero!
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With all the apparent lithologic diversity and patches of flattish bedrock as we've gone higher and higher up the rim, I'd be more surprised if they hadn't thought about coring. They've been shooting a lot more close-ups lately, that's for sure, and not just on the "white rocks". I assumed they were going to wait until reaching some accessible, heavy and stable boulder at Pico Turquino, and I still think they will. Nonetheless, it would be hard to miss the pretty distinct geologic units as we've sidled up to that hill, and erosion clearly has some interesting tales to tell around here. I definitely haven't been able to complain about the rover climbing too fast and blowing past interesting stuff lately.