At 05:34:04 UTC the Mastcam Left has taken the traces left on the Martian soil by its own wheels.
While in this shot the soil shows a prevalent turquoise coloration, the tracks left by Curiosity appear of the classic “Mars red” color.
Moreover, the tracks themselves do not appear deep at all, thus revealing that the turquoise coloration is produced only in a thin surface layer.
Since on Mars reddish dust is inexorably deposited everywhere, this thin turquoise layer must obviously be relatively “young”!
What is it formed from and why does it form?
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/02946/mcam/2946ML0153740461103397C00_DXXX.jpg
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