At 11:04:34 UTC the Mastcam Right took this nice photo of the drilling just performed by Curiosity in the area called “Glen Etive 1”.
With so many interesting rocks seen in the last days, I would have expected in drilling site a little more interesting than this simple layered rock.
In any case, the hole obtained appears to be deep enough and so we hope that the sample collected will be useful for physicochemical analysis.
In this case, the excavated material appears to be the same “Mars red” color as the rock itself, so I believe that the analyses will not provide any particular results, contrary to other drillings in which the excavated material appeared even bluish. However, we will wait patiently for the results of this (and other…) analyses, as soon as they are officially published.
To show colors more similar to those that the human eye would see, I subjected the image to a reduction of noise due to Jpeg compression, white balance and a slight increase in microcontrast and color saturation.
Original image: https://mars.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/02486/mcam/2486MR0132080010404946E01_DXXX.jpg
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