The Bookshelf area contains a variety of interesting rocks.
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Matt Golombek video Matt Golombek audio -- |
The rocks mentioned below are all in the Bookshelf area.
From that we went back towards the Rock Garden to get Souffle, which is a rock that is kind of near where Barnacle Bill was, and we're still thinking of trying to go into the Rock Garden from, in this sense, would have been a counter-clockwise way. We missed Souffle and decided en route that we couldn't get into the Rock Garden from that geometry and we had to go all the way around the lander. So we started our circumnavigation in a clockwise sense and traversed all the way around the lander.
The first thing we did was went to the Cabbage Patch and did a soil sequence near Scooby Doo. From there we went across the Flats, behind Calvin and Hobbes, those two sort of largish rocks and then swung back in to get a close-up image of the back side of mini-Matterhorn, which we couldn't see from the lander cameras. We got there and took a good picture and that looks like a great site to try and get a big dark rock with a Matterhorn peak to it to try and get an APX in the future; we'll probably come back that way to get that. And from that we started and went to Mermaid Dunes, which is a darker dune area just beyond where Matterhorn is and back in the distance toward the Rock Garden. We did a full soil mechanics there and some close-up imaging and we've got an APXS soil release on Mermaid Dunes and then we've started back around in front of a rock that was there, back towards the entrance to the Rock Garden and the Bookshelf, which are those stacked rocks. The Shark, Half Dome, let's see, Stimpy and Moe and in the front, Wedge, and we hope to get APXS readings on all of those rocks and multiple readings on Half Dome, which is the big one looking like it's sticking up there.
