We are retracing our steps, picking our way slowly back down from the pediment and the dangerous gator rocks which would have eaten our wheels!
We are retracing our steps, picking our way slowly back down from the pediment and the dangerous gator rocks which would have eaten our wheels!
There have been so many times across the almost ten years of our mission in Gale that, in order to keep the forward momentum going, we have needed to move on from sites, leaving our geologists sighing at the wonderful rocks behind us. Our images and compositional analyses usually downlink to Earth after we have left an area, and so we often wish for a “go-back” to zoom in on details that we only noticed in images or to get more compositional data on things that were unexpectedly intriguing.
So, although it is disappointing to be leaving the pediment (for now at least!), this does give us a golden opportunity to revisit outcrops that we passed on our drive up to the pediment, back in early March. We have a long wish list for this area, but Mastcam acquired some incredible imagery on the drive up, which we are using to pinpoint the best outcrops in this area.
We arrived at one of these outcrops on Wednesday, which exhibits a somewhat chaotic appearance and a jumble of veins and raised resistant ridges. Awkward wheel placements meant that we could not do any arm science (APXS and MAHLI) so we had to bump back just a little to be safer. This bump actually gave us a gift – it broke up some rocks in the workspace so we can analyze fresh surfaces. “Lodberrie” will be subjected to the full analytical suite of ChemCam, Mastcam, APXS and MAHLI in the targets, whilst Mastcam will image two other targets “Denny” and “Saltwick Bay.”
APXS and MAHLI will analyze “Sneuga” on one of these raised ridges, and MAHLI will get images of the nearby target “Inchbonny.” Mastcam will take further images of one of Wednesday’s targets (“Fort Charlotte”) on an area to the right of our workspace with abundant thin laminations but with few raised ridges. ChemCam will use LIBS to investigate the chemistry of the target “Lunna” in that same area. Mastcam will also acquire even more images of the “Feorachas” outcrop, the intended end of drive destination for this plan. You can see the two long linear ridges of this outcrop just beyond our current workspace (about 7 metres away) in the image above and in this Left Navigation camera image. Looking forward to seeing Monday’s workspace!
Written by Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, Planetary Geologist at University of New Brunswick
