"Stacked" Gusev wall

Hey hey!

Just spent half an hour in cross-eyed mode, staring at a piece of the Gusev wall.

(2N143512360EFF7600P1744R0M1.JPG
and
2N143512360EFF7600P1744L0M1.JPG)

The 3d effect in the foreground is cool, but its the background, 50-miles-distant Gusev wall that had me transfixed! The atmosphere seems clearer.

AND: At that distance, there's no displacement and so the brain just does a simple stacking on the two jpegs to make the features just that littlebit clearer. No need to do any fancy photoshopping crop-merge-gamma-contrast-sharpen or whatever!

Simply staring at the basic exploratorium jpegs (with stfmkr)did it for me!

Whata buzz!

Just go to
[Link] and [link]; load'em up into X-eyed mode, 100%, scroll to the horizon and enjoy!

God I can't wait for the pano from the top of Husband hill! Will we ever get there though?

------Martin M

It’s Mars!

Did you ever think we would see such a sight? We pretended we were there when we were kids. We've read stories about it, dreamed about it, gone to every movie about it. Now we're practically standing on Mars. The real thing. Another planet! What a great time to be alive.

What you see on these pictures is not a crater wall bur southern prat of Columbia hills.

Believe it or not, Atajurk... you're wrong!

I recommend you have a look at a map of the place. Columbia hills are really quite small.

The atmosphere has been clearing since Spirit was at Bonneville Crater. What you see, looking like extensive and distant hills... are in fact just a small piece of the crater wall. It is a huge thing really. And the wall is kinda like a circular mountain range.

Very very much further away than the Columbia hills, the southern part of which is straight ahead and obscurred by the rise.

--Martin M

uhh.... I mean, to the left, and obscurred by the rise....

Wow. I'm going to make a 3-D blink animation. Those work best for me, no squinting or glasses required.

Here is my 3-D animation. It does not "pop" too much, but does give a nice sense of perspective.

http://geocities.com/rlewis6/SouthMesas_MERA.htm

It looks like the distant mesas to the south,
near the apparent inflow channel at the south rim of Gusev crater. I am not 100% sure what this is, but it does look like the image is to the south, and also the cliffs look to close to be the rim of Gusev. The south mesas are closer than the Gusev rim. They are magnificent. They also appear to have the classic ridge and gully topology
of an alluvial fan eroded by water, a familiar formation throughout much of the southwest.

Wouldn't that be the inlet where Ma'adim valles emptied it's water into Gusev?

McKenzie, maybe I am not so wrong! If you compare navcam picture mentioned above with this pancam image, you can see that crater rim far behind is much higher and even there it is impossible to see any features. So I stay with Columbia hills.

Different lens. The Navcam has a 45degree field of view. The pancam is much narrower. See eg.

Try it yourself with hills around you in Slovenia. You will see the apparent height of the hills depends on the kind of lens.

As for Columbia hills, no way! They are quite tiny. Husband hill is only 90m high. The southern most hill is named after the Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon. And Ramon hill is less than 2kms away from the current site of Spirit, at it's outcrop ot the foot of Husband hill.

Check out some maps!
Here are some Gusev map links I googled. Just the first few hits.
link1
link2
link3

-------Martin :-/

Atajurk...
Sorry, those map links aren't much use.
Try link4

The idea is... the Columbia hills are just a tiny bump that happened to be close enough to where the rover landed that it was actually able to get to them. The crater itself is huge.

I can't find the map I want to show you.

-----Martin/

Well, I am pretty sure we are looking sue south in this image, over the west spur, where we are right now, and that distant feature should be the south mesas. And, yes gregp, that is where Ma'adim valley emptied "water" into gusev, in theory.

[link]

MOC narrow angle image of south mesas E03 - 00012

Duh, I posted the wrong link, the link I posted was E03-01511 whihc is WRONG, sorry.

Here is the CORRECT image, makes much more sense

MOC narrow angle image of south mesas E03 - 00012

It is only a few tens of km away, lets go there!

Woohoo!

That narrow angle image just keeps going and going and going....

Here is a 3d anaglyph of this area again from MOC images E0300012 and R0200357. It's a nice little 50+ kilometer flight if you have red/cyan glasses and time to download this 2.3 meg image. Worth it I think.

Duh, I jsut actually LOOKED at that giant JPG I posted and, wow, the columbia hills are at the top! I did not notice that at all

Anyhoo, you can see all KINDs of amazing terrain in there, look at it. And, you can see Ultreya abyss clearly, and just a few hundred meters south of there, that is ponding!!!

I wish I could post links and arrows but it is just as plain as the nose on your face, a deposit of light toned material a few hundred meters south of ultreya abyss, with a clear shoreline. I do not mean there is water there now, but there it looks like there WAS water that dried up there very recently.

Wow wow wow! It is only just over the next ridge! How come I have never seen this before, you guys have been yaking about ultreya abyss ad nauseum, has no one noticed this, or no one looked at this particular MOC image? It is one of the most recent sets released, I think it might only have been published in the last few weeks, I'm not sure.

Now I have to go sort through all those old posts on the Ultreya abyss and look for this, it has got to be there, or maybe it is NEW!! oh I am so excited!

OK, am I nuts? But now I can see it in some other images, it is just SOO much more clear in E03 - 00012, which is only 3m per pixel or therabouts.

But, this is way off topic, so I started a new thread. Did not mean to hijack this one.

[link]

BTW, this image:

Shows and labels the South Mesas.

I'd have to agree with McKenzie, the pics he posted in the opening post and rlewis' animation http://geocities.com/rlewis6/SouthMesas_MERA.htm are either the mesas at the water inlet or the rim of Gusev.

BTW, mesas are generally created by water aren't they? Oh yeah, maybe CO2 did it..... and unicorns now live there

I'd have to agree with McKenzie, the pics he posted in the opening post and rlewis' animation http://geocities.com/rlewis6/SouthMesas_MERA.htm are either the mesas at the water inlet or the rim of Gusev.

BTW, mesas are generally created by water aren't they? Oh yeah, maybe CO2 did it..... and unicorns now live there

Hey M McKenzie,

If you want to amp up your buzz try staring at these 360 pans in your X-eyed stereo viewer:

Left

Right

Weee! I'm on Mars.