23 November 2011
MSL Launch Info
Posted by Ryan Anderson
MSL is ready for a launch on Saturday, and the forecast is looking good! In preparation for the launch there is a bunch of great information about the mission available online. First, I highly recommend taking a look at the press kit. It is impressively detailed (more than 60 pages!) but quite reader-friendly. You can also head over to the MSL website for lots of photos of the launch prep and new depictions of the rover and the landing site. I also recommend checking out the Planetary Society blog for info about how to view the launch, and a nice comparison of the various Mars rovers and Viking. Also, I put together a flyer for the ChemCam team. Click the small version below for a higher-res view.
A Mars rover family portrait (plus Viking and Sagan, to scale) from the Planetary Society Blog.
An oblique view of Gale with 2x vertical exaggeration. Elevation data is from HRSC, surface details are from CTX, color is from Viking.
Informational flyer for ChemCam that I put together.
[…] An oblique view of Gale with 2x vertical exaggeration. Elevation data is from HRSC, surface details are from CTX, color is from Viking. From https://blogs.agu.org/martianchronicles […]
I’m hoping the sediments in Gale Crater prove to be greenstone, as in granite-greenstone terrain. An alternate model for the formation of plutonic and metamorphic rock suggests that most of these matl. were formed in the inner and outer Oort Clouds respectively, and suggests that the central uplift in comet craters is differentiated comet-core rock.
If our sun formed as a triple star, then the first-stellar-merger luminous red nova (LRN) may have blasted the planetary accretion disk matl. to the inner Oort cloud (IOC) where it formed comet clusters with authigenic gneiss cores. Then, schist formed from the hydrothermal fluids expelled during diagenesis and lithification of the gneiss sediments, forming a schist mantle over the gneiss-dome cores. And compound comets formed in the center of core-collapse comet clusters from mergers of smaller primary comets. The Appalachian Basin Province with its string of mantled gneiss domes may be an IOC compound-comet core.
Back to the sun. Then in winding in the smaller, tertiary stellar body into a contact binary, the sun may have streamed solar plasma to expel excess angular momentum, and the combined scourge of the red giant phase of the sun in the primary LRN and the streaming solar plasma may cooked the terrestrial planets to transform Venus and Earth from icy giants like Uranus and Neptune into the volatile-depleted rocky balls with iron cores they are today. And these planetary volatiles were blasted to the outer Oort cloud (OOC) in the secondary LRN.
The volatile-enriched OOC comets contained more short-lived radionuclides (created in the LRNe) which melted the authigenic granite sediments to form ‘massive’ plutonic-granite cores, but greenstone mantles formed in the same way as schist in IOC comets from hydrothermal fluids. The banded flow terrain in the larger Hellas Basin appears to show individual (oval) granite plutons within the exposed compound-comet core.