Stripe Rock Analysis
One of the first
"multispectral spots" obtained by the IMP camera was of the Stripe Rock on Sol
4. A multispectral spot measurement obtains small images of a region of interest in all
geology filters with no image compression. Stripe rock is of interest to Mars Pathfinder
scientists because of a bright vertical stripe that appears on the center of the rock
face. It was thought that this stripe might be an intruded vein of material of different
composition than the surrounding rock.
The color image of this rock shows that the stripe is of similar color
to the surrounding soils (see arrow). A detailed examination of the rock was conducted to
extract preliminary reflectance spectra (that is, the variation of brightness with color)
from nearby bright and dark soils, the stripe, and the surrounding rock. Although these
data require further calibration (e.g., the lower reflectance at 965 nm is not reliable at
this time), they do show that the general spectral characteristic of the stripe is quite
similar to the nearby dark soil. This suggests that the "stripe" is actually an
accumulation of soil deposited in a crack in the rock face.