opportunity pic; what's this? (no not ufo)it's a dirt thing

None of the above.

The pic is from the Microscopic Imager, and is of the area RAT'd by Opportunity on Sol 30. The larger curve you see in the first pic (on the left) is the outside of the area abraded by the RAT. It appears that the smaller 'cork' objects were other rocks embedded in the target rock and were also ground down to give this cutaway view.

a rock within a rock?? and that smooth surface is because the rover cut the rock?? that's what you're saying right?

if that is the case, precious gemstone theory comes to mind, stone within a stone, okay I want to go mars now.

Kano:

Do you have a link? I've never seen a microscope show a full shadow along with the area being magnified, and especially being magnified from such a high spot above the ground.

I would just like to see a link as you sound so sure, maybe your right and found a discription to go along with the pic. But like I said, I've never seen magnification taken from that high above a spot being magnified.

The reason for the two indentaions so close to each other is maybe they hit something lower and had to move to another location.

Muzz

Crossover with this thread here:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Also check out 'A beautiful Grind' here:
marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov...

On sol 30, which ended at 2:56 a.m. Tuesday, February 24, Opportunity performed its first rock abrasion tool operation on a rock target known as 'McKittrick Middle Rat' at the El Capitan site inside the crater. The tool shaved the rock over a period of two hours, grinding into a total depth of about 4 millimeters (.16 inches).

The auspicious day began with the song 'Rock'n Me' by Steve Miller and some miniature thermal emission spectrometer sky surveys and sky stares to study the atmosphere. After completing these activities, Opportunity took a short siesta to recharge its batteries. The rover has been doing a lot of science work at night, and the season on Mars is changing to winter, so the rover has less energy to work with than it did earlier in the mission. The martian days are getting shorter and the sun angle is not allowing either rover to power up the solar panels as much as in the past.

Opportunity woke up from its nap at 11:30 Local Solar Time on Mars to run through the series of commands required to retract the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer and close its doors; take several microscopic images of another nearby rock abrasion tool target called 'Guadalupe;' flip the wrist; take a microscopic image of "McKittrick Middle Rat;" and place the rock abrasion tool on its target to run at 13:00 Local Solar Time.

After the abrasion tool was retracted, a series of microscopic images of the scene were taken, and the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer was successfully placed into the abrasion tool's hole late in the day.

Some additional panoramic camera, miniature thermal emission spectrometer readings, and hazard avoidance camera imagery was completed through the day.

The plan for sol 31, which will end at 3:36 a.m. Wednesday, February 25, is to continue getting long M�ssbauer readings of the rock abrasion tool hole and to prepare the tool for more work again on sol 33 or 34.

Looks like the round objects inside the ground-region are those little BB-size objects we have seen in other rocks, should be useful to help figure out what they are.

There's no pic's along with those new's article's. How can you be sure this is the same thing we're looking at? Like I said, I've never seen a microscope that can show full sized shadow's along with the area being magnified and from being abviously high above the area 'magnified'.

thanks for the explanation kano.

so basically it is the blueberry cut in half.

interesting little rocks, i can see them as a martian bb pearl necklace...who knows we might be going back to mars to harvest blueberries.

True WW, at the moment these images are asking more questions than they are answering, does anyone know any Earth formations that are analogous to these?


(Incidentally, for those playing the home game, we know its from the microscopic imager because of the filename.)

[Edited on 25-2-2004 by Kano]

kano, maybe you can explain those images that show a circle that seems to appear at least once in most sols.

what exactly is that a picture of????

marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov...

thanks in advance.

Its the sun through the Solar filters.

L8 and R8 have ND filters on them to allow the PanCam to look at the sun.

From memory this is done to make sure the Rover has a solid lock on its location and orientation.