At 03:11:37 UTC the Mastcam Left has captured these beautiful blue rocks on the Red Planet!
They seem out of context, as in many other cases in which Curiosity has photographed meteorites conspicuously “alien” to the surrounding environment, but in this case is their morphology in layers to tell us that this is not a meteorite but rocks of sedimentary origin.
Of course, we have also already seen sedimentary rocks of this color, but mostly they were covered by a layer of dust (or presumed such …) reddish color, while the rock in the foreground appears poorly dusty as if it were of relatively recent formation compared to the rocks below.
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/02620/mcam/2620ML0137630081000670C00_DXXX.jpg
This post has been automatically translated. See the original post here.