I don't how I could have missed this one! If any of my dear readers were expecting a 'hear ye' from me for this one, my sincerest apologies. Let me not wallow in my misery and just get through with it. For consolation there is plenty of new, neat stuff and I think the best news is that the MSL team has selected their first rock for contact science! This means they'll get to use their the APXS and MAHLI on this one which have to actually 'touch' the surface of the rock. Say hello to 'Jake Matijevic'.
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| This is a navigation camera image of the lucky rock shot on sol 43. Jake Matijevic is 25cm tall by 40cm wide (NASA/JPL) |
It looks like a block of basalt thrown from somewhere else. I'll stop at the word basalt because you never can do casual geology with much accuracy anyway. It was selected primarily because it is the right dimensions to give the contact instruments a work out. Probably it will be delayed for a sol due to orbiter comm scheduling issues.
They did also show some great animations of the Phobos transit and they also mentioned that they did take images of Deimos, a much smaller Martian moon, transiting the sun yesterday. What's astonishing is that while Phobos was blocking a fifth of the solar disk, the REMS instrument, which has an ultraviolet sensor, also detected a drop in UV radiation by 5%! How cool is collaborative science!
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| Sol 37's transit was observed with the 100mm focus mastcam science camera. There is also a 34mm counterpart which took the same view with a third of the 100mm resolution. This is animation is running at 3fps with 9 frames (NASA/JPL/MSSS) |
The image below that accompanied the telecon compares the views of the mastcam 100 and 34mm.
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| The images' temporal difference is 18secs (NASA/JPL/MSSS) |
That wraps it all in a nutshell basically. Stay curious!
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| Progress so far (NASA/JPL/UA) |
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