On the Road Again - volume 4 - Page 16

and a single solitary blueberry,,,odd
,,,

In Hort's sol 2140 image, several of the ejected blocks show fracture fill parallel to the bedding planes which confirms the horizontal fractures are old and IMO may have been caused by the force of an earlier impact when these beds were below the surface ( and possibly even below the water table)

You can also see festoon bedding in one of the blocks similar to that which we discussed 4 yrs ago and AZ ST. and I concluded was probably due to oscillating,wind generated currents in shallow standing water.

Kye

The reality of a recent crater with ejecta showing fracture fills and exposed berries with non-unidirectional tails on evaporite rock surfaces should cause all who theorize on the how meridiani developed to stop and take stock. This is especially so since the phoenix debacle has highlighted the fact that current lander / rover instruments cannot identify water or ice even when it's there and covered with dust.

Have you considered the ramifications of accepting that the fracture filling process was going on below the surface in the recent past? That lets in the ideas of; water based reactions below the surface of meridiani; chemical action also, and who knows, perhaps even the creation of berries just below the surface in an environment, perhaps unlike any on earth, where there might be a possibility of anaerobic microbial action being involved in many of the phenomena we see at ground level and which most just ignore or pass off with learned theories.

I think it may soon be time to look for a new theory for the development of the berries at Meridiani

Ben, LWS--

Right, there are so may things we're seeing here that this may well prove to be a major science stop.

--Bill

Bill Harris

Yes! Looking back, don't we wish that they had stayed a bit longer to explore the Oppy heat shield "crater" in much more detail?

Also, I wonder if some regret that they bypassed so many recent looking craters on the way with only some distant pancam shots?

Winston

Ben, reference your 292, I make the impact energy to be around 3 X 10^9 joules so some induration is indeed possible. I wouldn't dismiss the impact melt comment entirely although I personally see this coating as fracture fill where the rock broke up along pre existing cracks.

JPL have made some off the cuff calls before (not the least of which was the age call for this crater). To my eye it looks much, much older than they indicated. But as you say, on another forum the words of JPL are golden and cannot be challenged (while similar errors by ESA PR reps are subject to scorn).

Correction. I took Bill's 40 meter figure for the crater without checking. Actual diameter is 10 meters and so around 1.3 x 10^7 joules, so impact melt probability drops significantly.

Oh foodle. I was thinking 40 feet or 12 meters and got units mixed up. Makes a difference!

Winston, looking back one wishes that some things had been done differently, but hindsight is 20/20 and it's easy to be a backseat driver.

It's been a fun ride, nonethless.

--Bill

I consider the greatest mistake was to not investigate the pile of dark rocks oppy saw on sol 658B.

sol 2147 ( Feb 7, 2010 ) pan in front of "Chocolate Hills":

with links to 3D pairs.

My guess is Oppy will be here for a few weeks.

I wonder what features of these rocks prompted the name "Chocolate Hills"?

Ben; I agree that bypassing the pile of dark rocks was probably a mistake.

Bill; I recognize that hindsight is 20-20 vision and nothing can be done about choices made by NASA/JPL at this time but I don't think that we should be constrained from commenting on these matters.

At the times when the rover jockeys bypassed several interesting areas (eg. the pile of dark rocks, heat shield ditch, a number of apparently recent craters, some subsidence areas, etc.) many here commented that they would have wished for Oppy to spend a little time examining them. Of course we did'nt know exactly what drove the routing and the urgency of moving on and it is quite possible that they always made the best choices given their priorities. However, my view has always been that, given the fact that the mission was wildly successful immediately after the original 90 days, everything else was gravy and, for example, it might have paid some dividends to our knowledge of the area for Oppy to have returned to some interesting areas on and in Victoria crater (eg. the interesting small sub-crater on the edge, the dark streaks area, etc., and look for changes at the surface by pancam and MI, before exiting the victoria area.

I know, it is a geology mission but despite the lack of other instrumentation, a number of observations could have been made that could have improved our general knowledge of meridiani.

Actually, I hope that when Oppy follows Spirit, as it must do someday, that it will end up in an area like this crater rim where it can take time lapse pancam images of interesting stuff to its heart's content and that it would still be capable of upturning a number of pavement rocks and see what is under them.

Winston

I have create volume 5 of this topic because posting times are becoming so long and lots of internal server errors are happening when trying to reference the topic.

Let me squeeze in this one last comment on the "shoulda-woulda done" topic.

Ben, Winston, absolutely. Even though I made the "hindsight" comment, I'd have made that about anything, even things I have done.

I do think that driving past that early cobble pile at Erebus/Olympia was a major mistake, especially since we'd spent several months there twiddling the IDD figuring out what to do with a stalled (or whatever) motor. It seems that they get hell-bent for making good time to a waypoint and forget to look along the way. Even though the goal is to get from Point A to Point B, the actual course is A1, A2, A3,...An..., B, with "B" being an endpoint.

--Bill