At 11:52:35 UTC Mastcam Right captured these beautiful little hills here and there tinged with greenish spots and a clear blue sky.
You can see an abundance of these greenish spots just about everywhere, on the rocks as well as on the sand. In particular, if you look at the slabs of rock visible in the background at the top right, you will notice how these spots can have blurred outlines without affecting the entire rock.
This fact clearly indicates that the material that determines the greenish coloration must be present only on the surface of the rock and it is not an integral part of the composition of the rock itself.
Obviously, the final confirmation will be had only when the technicians of Curiosity deign to use the rotating wire brush to “clean” one of these rocks thus ascertaining the actual color of the rock below.
Awaiting such verification, we remain only in the field of supposition; it is simple mineral deposits or some kind of lichen?
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.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/02597/mcam/2597MR0136540351100868C00_DXXX.jpg
This post has been automatically translated. See the original post here.