At 11:42:55 UTC the Mastcam Right imaged a small “crater” with peculiar characteristics.
Given the perspective view, the shape appears elliptical but the true shape is most likely circular or nearly so. This feature leads to think that it is a small impact crater, but other details seem to contradict this hypothesis.
Regarding the total lack of central depth it can be easily assumed that this has been filled by sand carried by the wind; in fact, the total lack of stones in the inner part seems to confirm this hypothesis.
However, the peculiarity lies in the total absence of relief in the edge of this presumed impact crater, an edge that otherwise should be higher than both inside and outside.
Moreover, since the edge is constituted mainly by rocks, it seems very improbable that these have been blunted by any form of erosion, considering that the rocks present on the edge show some shapes all but blunted if not even pointed!
But if it had not been created by a meteorite, which other phenomenon would have generated a geometric form so regular?
The original image is a black and white encoding of the Bayer mask that has been converted to color through a process called “debayering” or “demosaicing”. In addition, the photo has undergone noise reduction due to Jpeg compression, white balance and a slight increase in microcontrast and color saturation in order to make the colors more similar to what the human eye would see.
Original image: https://mars.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/02925/mcam/2925MR0152640021300759C00_DXXX.jpg
This post has been automatically translated. See the original post here.