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Bruce Murray Space Image Library

Shifting Rocks at the Aberlady Drill Site

Shifting Rocks at the Aberlady Drill Site
Shifting Rocks at the Aberlady Drill Site Curiosity drilled at Aberlady on sol 2370 (7 April 2019). The drilling was incredibly easy going; the rover needed to use no percussion, only drill rotation. It's possible that the easy going resulted from the rock being thinner than the length of the drill bit. When Curiosity pulled the drill out, the drilled rock lifted up. Unsure about the quality of the drilled sample, the Curiosity team decided after CheMin analysis to dump the Aberlady sample and try again nearby, at Kilmarie, to acquire a better sample for SAM. NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / Emily Lakdawalla

The animation is made from images acquired on sols 2368 and 2370. They were returned to Earth uncompressed, and the uncompressed images converted to JPEG before posting. They have been debayered and warped to match each other. Debayering of JPEG-compressed raw images causes greenish artifacts in the image, which have been reduced by mixing some of the red channel into the green channel. A much better version could be made from archival data when that becomes available.