At 18:31:41 UTC Mastcam Right captured this beautiful photo of a Martian layered rock.
Harder layers interspersed with more erodible layers form a curious “lasagna” effect, perhaps evidence of a recurring cyclic variation in the Martian climate.
Aside from the ever-present gypsum, this rock has some interesting color characteristics.
While the flat upper part shows the typical “Mars red” color, the underlying layers appear darker and tending to purple. There are also some greenish spots, both in the outer profile of the layers closer to the ground and in the upper flat part; what will be the reason for all these color variations and in particular the greenish spots?
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.
Original image: https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/02461/mcam/2461MR0130660061004014C00_DXXX.jpg
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