25, white-Latinx, plural trans therian photographer and musician. Anarcha-feminist. Occasionally NSFW
discord: hypatiacoyote
i was lucky enough to be able to request some photos taken with curiosity's chemcam remote microimager camera over the weekend! i asked the chemcam team to point it at the base of a cliff face near the rover, and thanks to their excellent planning work, we now have a beautiful photo of the layering styles that are exposed there.
image credit: nasa / jpl-caltech / lanl / aster cowart
What’s going with the bit of dark sand below the crack on the right? In an Earth photo I would have said it was wet. The waves in the sand just to the left of that are due to wind?
the sand itself is a dark brown/gray (it's very similar to the stuff you find on basaltic black sand beaches here on earth), but sand that doesn't move for a while tends to get a coating of the light red/pink dust that is constantly falling out of the air. whenever the sand slips because it piled up too steeply, that light-colored coating gets mixed in, so it looks like water dripped down the slope. in reality it's a completely liquid-free process.
