At 17:39:19 UTC the Mastcam Left has taken another track impressed by a wheel of the rover, which also in this case shows us a soil definitely wet and therefore as plastic as clay to model!
Also in this case the contours are extraordinarily clear, even where the soil is rich in pebbles, the compactness and cohesion observed is therefore justified only by the presence of water.
As I have already explained in the photo of the previous Sol (see https://www.facebook.com/PianetaMarte.MdM/posts/2975358355880671) the local environmental conditions seem favorable to the formation of liquid water and therefore we should not be surprised so much …
What should instead be surprising is the complex roughness of rocks that should have been extremely smooth by erosion, rocks that instead show an almost “coral” appearance!
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.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/02781/mcam/2781ML0145630030606476C00_DXXX.jpg
This post has been automatically translated. See the original post here.