jbridges
Subscribe to jbridges's posts28th September 2014 Sol 762
Pahrump Hills Drillhole We have completed the mini and main drill holes, at the Confidence Hills locality in Pahrump Hills. Over the weekend the drill powder is being sieved and transferred to CheMin. The lighter colour compared to the Kimberley drillhole suggests there is less Fe oxide at this locality. One of the other features […]
24th September 2014 Sol 758
We are drilling at Pahrump (named after an old Shoshone, native American settlement in what is now Nevada). This is part of the new phase of our mission where we plan to spend a higher proportion of our time making analyses relative to driving. Meanwhile the Navcams have captured this spectacular view of the Pahrump […]
20th September 2014 Sol 755
This striking image shows the flat surface of the local mudstone in the Pahrump area. In it you can see raised ridges and veins, a bit like we saw back in Yellowknife Bay. This may be related to periodic dessication, as the lake deposits dried up at times in their evolution. You can see dunes […]
11th September 2014 Sol 746
We have now reached the first foothills in the Mt. Sharp part of the mission. This area is called the Pahrump Hills. The Navcam image shows the sort of terrain we will be driving over in the next part of the mission as we spend more time analysing and drilling the sedimentary rock outcrops compared […]
1st September 2014 Sol 736
We are in an uneven area of terrain with sand-filled hollows so we have changed direction, out of Hidden Valley and via Trilobite Crater. The rover planners ‘RP’s’ are cautious about slippage in sand. At a early stage in the Mars Exploration Rover’s missions, in mid 2005, Opportunity became stuck with several wheels buried in the […]
21st August 2014 Sol 726
As we were performing a minidrill – thats the smaller test hole prior to a large full drill hole – the prongs that keep the turret and drill steady slipped by a small amount.. This caused the drilling to halt. It may be that Bonanza_King is softer than we have come across before. The drill […]
19th August 2014 Sol 724
We have started the condensed drilling procedures at Bonanza_King, having driven back out of Hidden Valley and its sandy deposits, to take another route. You can see that the brush is working and we have just exposed the now familiar grey Mars beneath the oxidised red veneer, prior to drilling. It looks like some late […]
15th August 2014 Sol 720
We have retraced our tracks in Hidden Valley, going back to a site called Bonanza_King. We are going to do a short drilling programme (‘Condensed Drilling’) here on some outcrop in the bright area in the Navcam photo. Its important that we get analyses of the mineralogy of a representative selection of different rock types […]
5th August 2014 Sol 710
We are moving into a new sort of terrain as we enter Hidden Valley. On this HiRISE image and the inset MAHLI image you can see the sand ripples that we are traversing. This has benefits over the hard rocky terrain as there will be less wear on the wheels but we will monitor slippage carefully […]
31st July 2014 Sol 705
We have been analysing the Windjana drill tailings for over 2 months now and have just dumped the drill tailings. The long and repeat analyses by SAM and CheMin allowed us to look at the effects of degassing of samples over time (e.g. the noble gas argon, used in K-Ar dating) and to get the best […]
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