At 14:31:58 UTC the Mastcam Left has taken this beautiful picture of the second drilling just performed by Curiosity in the area called “Glen Etive 1”.
To my knowledge, this is the first time that Curiosity performs a second drilling on the same rock and this is of great interest because it could mean that the preliminary results of the analysis made on the material excavated from the first drilling have shown something “strange” such as to require a second excavation to confirm or refute the results of the first analysis.
What could be so interesting about this rock?
If I may hazard a guess, I would say that such a finely laminated sedimentary rock could have something in common with terrestrial stromatolites (see https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatoliti), generated by the activity of photosynthetic benthic microorganisms, especially cyanobacteria (blue algae).
I wouldn’t be surprised if some indiscretions leak out over the next few days….
To show colors more similar to what the human eye would see, I subjected the image to noise reduction 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/02527/mcam/2527ML0133270010805294E01_DXXX.jpg
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