Phoenix on Mars

Horton
Reply 256:
That's a beauty! Look at the center rock with the soil walls welling up around it.

That's what you get when you toss a rock into a coherent muddy material or a dry fine coherent material.

It's also the kind of pattern formed by a rock sitting in a saturated frozen mud that experiences cyclic freeze-thaw cycles.

It looks more like a freeze-thaw sedimentary record to me.
I believe that the same process on Earth occurs in frost wedging/heaving. This is a process where freeze-thaw cycles cause rocks to be pushed up to the surface through surrounding soil by the surrounding soil. This rock was probably either pushed up to the surface by this process OR it has been on the surface for sometime and the soil below is the right consistancy where it is trying to push up the rock but the rock can't be pushed up any further.

Or could the rock have been displaced by the thrusters....

Does anyone know what the scale of the center rock is?

sol 43 visible / infrared detail of rocks around the old watering hole:

OK, maybe.

I was particularly amazed by the collection of what look like quite spherical, similar sized rocks -- with dimples?

What could possibly be the mechanism for placing these rocks in one place?

???
Yeah..What the...?
Probably just a small congregation of stromatolites.

I think they could be fossils. I've always been of the opinion that the most successful macroscopic life-forms on Mars would be spherical, and have a thick skin. This would allow them to be pressurized. An impervious skin and a high internal pressure would both restrict sublimation, making it easier to contain water in a liquid form, essential for biological processes.

That's why I've always been of the opinion that the "berries" are biological in origin. They fit the bill, and they don't look like any non-biological concretions that I've seen.

Apart from the "berries", there have been several pictures of larger objects that appeared to be hollow shells, with holes in them. These too are fossils, in my opinion. The spheres here could be "berries" or they could be smaller relatives of those shells.

Now the mark of a successful lifeform is ubiquity, or near-ubiquity. On Earth, for instance, grasses and trees are found almost everywhere. If the berries were just confined to a couple of locations, then that might suggest they were just concretions, or something else non-biological. But if it turns out that they occur almost everywhere, I don't think it's credible that near-identical non-biological concretions would occur almost everywhere on Mars.

Sorted frost circle?

Hi Martin

You've just expressed, much better than I can, almost exactly my views on the berries and the numerous very small spheres we have been seeing in the landscape surrounding Phoenix. Especially your last paragraph.

Winston

sol 44 L1R1abc detail of, er, a cubic rock?:

from here.

The R1ABC part of the 3D is an R1 image colorized with a 1/2 size RABC image. Of course, everything had to be aligned... and then alighed ... and then aligned.

I. JUST. DON'T. GET. IT.

There is no rhyme or reason to the misalignments of the filters....

Ah well, the mission 1/2 over ( the sol counting was base 0, so 45 sols have passed.).

To make things even more frustrating, the format of the metadata in UA files was changed on sol 43 -- for some files -- so I had to rewrite the rules for renaming the their brain dead file names ( lg_xxxxx - with xxxx now beyond 1169 .

Its almost like, like, they don't want anyone to actually do more than look at each image without any context.

Naaah!

Where are the raw OMs???

sol 44 RAC 3D of partially opened TEGA doors:

No soil for you!

The Phoenix RAC guys are getting pretty good at RAC 3D.

Now, why not tilt the scoop ever so slightly ( afew milliradians?) after one of the scoop tip sequences -- and run another -- for a super 3D macro color view of the soil.

Just a pretty picture...

Does anyone else see a wheat field here someday? ( OK, ok, maybe a hearty genetically enhanced lichen field... )

sol 46 animation of TCP touch:

Just bizarre. Look at the animation before you read my Flickr comments - and look at it again.

Er, is anyone following this topic any more?

How aboutan animation of some "icy soil" "drying out":

No?

Some pleasing 3D scenes of rocks and soil?

This sol 46 animation is spectacular. Which forces is capable to do this?

Horton, your work is priceless.

James Canvin's Peter Pan Panorama:

A must see!

Bravo James!

Your work is why I stopped doing full Mars panoramas.

Hi Hort

Super sol 45 animation.

Seems to me that the soil is bound together by forces yet invisible to the microscope and those moving small objects are merely sitting on the soil and crevices and are disturbed by the probes which stretch the soil matrix as they are pressed in. i.e. the probes' force is not limited to merely just a very short distance around the probes but much further afield.

Another possibility is that there is life there somehow reacting to the very unusual insertion of the probes in their vicinity.

Winston

Winston,

Maybe the Martians don't like ( wait for it ) alien anal probes?

Or maybe one of them was shouting Don't taze me, Bro'!

Hort,
Nice animation. Looks like a crust (layer of duricrust) over the soil. In fact the overlying the surface look as if they may be fragments of duricrust. Certainly that is what I would think were this taken on earth.

Not sure about your icy soil sublimating. Need to see it with the same illumination noting the significant change in brightness (same filter?.

sol 46 near Midnight looking North:

Color by Horticolor: Color? What color?

brian, I knew you ( or someone else ) would make that very point about the icy soil animation.

I am faced with a problem when I create these images: Either spend the time making the images -- or spend time documenting how they are made.

I once kept a very detailed journal of my life until I noted in the journal that by spending so much time writing about my life I had less and less time to actually live it.

I choose life and stopped writing. ( It was about a very traumatic period in my life. Some who have read selected portions have said it should be published. Maybe when I get too old and feeble to do anything else I will edit it and release it on the world. )

Anyway, to answer your specific question, since the images were shot with the RAC there were no filters. The maddening part was alignment.

I analyzed the brightness distributions and matched the median and standard deviation of the distributions for the selected areas.

( Honest to God I think the sequences programmed are designed to make it difficult for duffers like myself to do anything with the images. )

I didn't believe the results myself, so I redid them and cross checked them with the entire RAC sequence -- plus registered the area in the trench with an SSI RABC image with a double affine alignment. ( I almost included that in the animation but decided it detracted rather than enhanced the presentation.)

So is it a "real" cross-image comparison? It's as "real" as I can make it with my primitive tools.

Sorry. Since it's not "official" I guess it's not.

Thanks Hort. I only asked coz of the comparative flare on the metal 'bit'. Hmm, obviously your definition of a duffer and mine differ considerably. I appreciate your art more than most of the efforts posted in the various forums. And from time to time I still view and enjoy your CD from the Eagle/Endurance period.

Excellent images Horton!
It's like the 4th of July fireworks everyday with your postings and images!!!

sol 46 animation of lighting chages in TEC neighborhood:

It ain't really green on the rock.

At least I don't think it is. I tried using the D exposure with the RGB, but there was an odd shape to the brightmess distribution that I couldn't correct.

Most likely the problem resulted from clipping of both the high and low ends of the brightness distribution.

I look forward to NASA's "Earth color" of this area.

An ...ER.. for horton, average duffer, my average joe foot.

Absolutly incredible you can line these images up, and then create things totally wierd things for us to see.

what about small holes, honycombed ground, from all the gasses being created from freeze thaw? we can see the bigger holes i believe

I know that Nasa and the imaging branches must use some powerful software to line up, and stack, to get all they can from the images, Slightly different perspectives, can give a much greater range of detail.

i wonder about their different use of 3d building.