On the Road Again - volume 4 - Page 12

Horton, re your 219, Thanks for the link but unless I missed something that elevation map covers too small an area to properly show the feature that I'm talking about. It confirms that there is a small rise at the rim as we all agree. It can't show the subtle depression at the scale of the entire annulus. It's nice, I think that it is accurate and not in contradiction with the contour map or with my observation that the annulus as a whole is on average depressed below the surrounding plain.

The HiRise Digital Terrain Model page has a few DTM images - but not Victoria. There are 1346 stereo pairs but only a very few have been converted to DTMs by the HiRise team.

Bummer.

Hort said:

"Here is the Victoria HiRise DEM ( Digitial Elevation Model ) from HiRISE"

And here is the Victoria DEM from the HiRISE site:

http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/dtm/dtm.php?ID=PSP_001414_1780

I guess we really, really need to drop a hint to thme that we need the DEM mapping along the Oppy travese to Endeavour...

--Bill

Hort, we're getting to the glitch where we don't always see the last post in the thread. When I made my Reply# 223, your Reply# 222 wasn't visible. I was actually replying to your post on Page 11.

Anyways, the Victoria DEM is on Page Two of the DTMs at the HiRISE site, listed as "Possible Opportunity Rover Landing Site
19 Jan 2010" D'oh.

--Bill

Hort>>>

thanks for your 182...just saw it tonight.

yt
dx

The sol 2139 ( Jan 29, 2010 ) 4x2 L257 montage defeated autostitch - illustrating a basic design flaw of the pancam mount: The camera must pivot through the node of the camera lens to create seamless panoramas with both near and far oblects.

The MSL has a much better design ( the left camera pivots over the center of the mast ), so you kind'a wonder why the MER cameras didn't do the same thing.

And here is an interesting rock at the sol 2136 position taken just before the sol 2138 move. It is most likely debris from Concepcion.

Sol 2139 L257 4x2 pan near Concepcion:

Had to drag out the "big gun" to do this one. I ignored the rover in the stitching.

The pan is simply called "pancam_survey_4x2"

What is interesting about the soil around the crater? Maybe looking for a patch of silty clay?

My first reaction was this rock is something different but after studying it have concluded it is just another chunk of Meridiani beds that shows some odd erosion .

Please note the fracture filling behind the rock and in lower right front and possibly crossing the rock itself.

Bill ,I am about to abandon the conglomerate idea because if there were imbedded cobbles of harder material,some would have eroded out and they would be strewn around and I haven't seen any

I have concluded nothing unusual around here so pedal to the metal.

Hi Ben>>>

Really glad you remain here, observing. Not being a geologist but an avid 'rocker' and highly excited about the 'layering' of these ejected rocks, can you please speculate on the layerings and what might possibly be between the hard and soft stone material?

Would you not think that this is layered sea bedding [dare I say silt material] material-[perhaps full of early microscopic fossils of some sort?- [with this in mind consider the Mars rocks discovered on Earth in the Antarctica and other places-and even as I type this those rocks are being microscopically examined at the micron level] ...obviously very old and showing itself to us for the first time. [BTW-it was here all the time]

Thanks for your time Ben.

yt
dx

DX; The layered bedding is for the most part , horizontal , and suggests cyclic, alternating softer and harder layers that have not been disturbed by anything more than impacts and wind erosion.

IMHO there may have been some periodic fluvial erosion as well.

I don't remember any grain size analyses of the different layers which would help distinguish them so we can't be sure it is a depositional phenomena.

On the other hand I see no evidence that it
is an alternating diagenetic process.

Varves occur in shallow water (lake) sediments and represent annual accumulations.

I am tempted to think these layers also represent alternating depositional environments in probable shallow water but on a longer term cycle.

It would be very helpful if micro-fossils could be discovered that would provide more data but personally think the environment was a harsh volcanic one with probable very warm ,acidic , shallow water.

These beds were also preceded and possibly accompanied by aeolian X-bedded dunes found in the walls of VC

Ben>>>

Thanks for your comments...I can go no further.

yt
dx

New L257 Pancams up on Exploratorium from the AB66 site (Sol 2140). Interesting details on the rubble afoot.

Also we have a good sequence of distant horizon images. We're seeing detail on the Endeavour and Iazu rim hills and, more importantly, foreground, midground and background features.

Attached, if this works out, is a panorama of three Pancam L257 images, 3x vertical exaggeration. Color matching is so-so and I'm not quite sure about the horizon alignment. Something to mull over whilst we're waiting for the Horticolor version...

--Bill

Here is my first hack at the sol 2140 Concepcion horizon. I will work on the crater later today.

Great panorama Bill. What do you reckon the vertical exaggeration is ?

Sorry Bill; Should have read more closely

And here is the lower half of the pan with a link to a saturated color image of an interesting collection of rocks.

And here is my take on the 4X vertical stretch of the horizon.

I can't decide if the darker areas in front of Lazu are dark features on the Lazu plateau or features much closer...

Hort>>>

Great pic in your 233 above>>>>you must be running 2 or 3 or perhaps 4 GPU's in SLI or Crossfire mode. Those are big files!!!

I am running 2 GPU's in SLI and the image is fast and clean. Thanks.

yt
dx

er, no dx, I am bumping along the ground using a 10 year old Pentium 4 system w/ 768 MB of RAM and 540 GB of disk space, running Windows 2000.

I am patient.

When one of the "barn burner" image applications is running I do "something else" that doesn't require many computer resources.

The pan in reply 233 actually was a lot of work.

The L7 filter in the last image was missing data, so I first synthesized the L7 filter by subtracting the L2 filter from twice the L5 filter and then adjusted the brightness and contrast of the synthesized L7 filter to match an area close to the missing data. Then I replaced the missing L7 data with the synthesized L7 data.

Then I applied a 25% vignette correction and doubled the image sizes. Then I did a translation registration on each RGB double-sized tuple ( there appears to be a one or 2 pixel misalignment of the individual filter images ) and then applied a square root transform to the brightness of each image and then did a global adjustment to all the images to highlight the subtle details on the crater rims on the hotizon.

Then I created RGB images from the aligned and vignette corrected filters and then ran the program autostitch to stitch the images into a panorama. It took several "tweaks" to get the horizon, er, horizontal and the color blending to my satisfaction.

I then did a final manual adjustment to the color and contrast to bring out those subtle crater rim details.

The whole process took over an hour of my time and maybe a minute of the computer's time.

I think that the dark areas to the left side of the Iazu plateau (pedestal??) are the southern rim of Endeavour. The one dark area in the center of the plateau is the near promontory of the plateau. And, of course, a lot of foreshortened hills and bumps.

Interesting collection, indeed. We are seeing rocks exposed to weathering for only a few years, as well as providing a window to the subsurface. As I've mused, hopefully heading down-hill will take us down-section so thia can eb a preview to that.

Ben--

A quick-and-dirty on my filenaming system:

L257-1P318162102--pano-exagg3.jpg

L257: color composite using the L2, L5 and L7 Pancam filters.

1P318162102: the source image. Usually I use the entire image name, but sometimes I'll abbreviate it to the timestamp (like here).

pano: a panorama of two or more images

exagg3: a 3x vertical exaggeration.

and "annot" is annotated, and so forth.

Madness, with method...

--Bill

Sol 2140 false color detail + saturated color of very, very interesting area in the crater on the south rim:

Er, the "bluish" stuff seems to be associated with a particular level.

A water level of some sort?

OK, IF the cratering event cracks the bedrock deep enough to reach the subsurface water-ice ( don't tell me ther isn't one! ) THEN for how long ( a thousand years? ) could water escape to the surface and alter the surrounding rock? Just sayin'.