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Emily Lakdawalla • Sep 30, 2010

Fourth MSL Landing Site Workshop: Day 2: Reports from Ryan Anderson

I left the first day of the Fourth Mars Science Laboratory Landing Site Community Workshop on Monday just as they were getting in to the site-specific presentations. I left with no concern that I'd miss anything, though, because I knew that once he got done presenting his own work on Gale Crater, Cornell grad student Ryan Anderson would be taking notes and blogging the presentations on the other three sites. Here are links to his detailed and well-illustrated blog entries:

I attended the first half of yesterday, and will hopefully get my notes from that posted later today—after about a billion other things that I need to post first!

The 'Grand Canyon' of Gale
The 'Grand Canyon' of Gale This canyon occurs on the lower west side of the 5 km-thick mound in northern Gale Crater. It and several smaller canyons and troughs on the lower portions of the mound are evidence that the rocks MSL would study in Gale -- at least during the first one or two Mars years it is on the ground -- are so old that the layered material was deposited, buried, hardened to form rock, then re-exposed to the surface and eroded by running water (or similar liquid). The central part of the Gale mound contains layers of rock that were formed after this and the other canyons were created -- in other words, there a lot of changing environments and conditions are recorded in the Gale mound. This picture is a stereo anaglyph (red left eye, blue right eye) composed of sub-frames of MRO CTX images P01_001488_1751_XI_04S222W and P02_001752_1753_XI_04S222W. North is up. The data were acquired in November and December 2006 and processed to make the anaglyph by Malin Space Science Systems personnel.Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

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