There is a particularly obvious joint in the left of the “door” image, but several others can be made out – including one that forms the smooth wall that lines up with the left side of the “door” itself. These are fractures that typically open up when the weight of overlying rock layers is removed by erosion. ![]() These once covered the stream and lake sediments that Curiosity examined earlier in its gradual climb up through the layers of sedimentary rock making up Mount Sharp.Ī geologist would also spot the steep and fairly straight cracks running up the rock face, and recognise these as “joints”. A geologist would note the thin and slightly sloping repeated layers of sandstone making up the whole of the rock face, and would immediately expect that they were looking at the eroded remains of hardened sand dunes. Nobody with even a little geological experience is likely to mistake the feature as a “door”. Nasa/JPL-Caltech/MSSS What the “door” really is Raw Curiosity camera image centred on the ‘door’. The Open University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK. He is Educator on the Open University's free learning Badged Open Course (BOC) on Moons and its equivalent FutureLearn Moons MOOC, and chair of the Open University's level 2 course on Planetary Science and the Search for Life. He is author of Planet Mercury - from Pale Pink Dot to Dynamic World (Springer, 2015), Moons: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Planets: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010). He has received funding from the UK Space Agency and the Science & Technology Facilities Council for work related to Mercury and BepiColombo, and from the European Commission under its Horizon 2020 programme for work on planetary geological mapping (776276 Planmap). He is co-leader of the European Space Agency's Mercury Surface and Composition Working Group, and a Co-Investigator on MIXS (Mercury Imaging X-ray Spectrometer) that is now on its way to Mercury on board the European Space Agency's Mercury orbiter BepiColombo. Professor of Planetary Geosciences, The Open Universityĭavid Rothery is Professor of Planetary Geosciences at the Open University.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |