Squash

Squash has turned out to be a very intriguing rock.

Joy Crisp video Joy Crisp audio --

The first rock that comes to mind is called Squash and I think it first got that name because somebody thought that it looked like it had been squashed by the airbags when the lander came to rest. I'm not sure there is any evidence for it having been squashed, but never-the-less, it has turned out to be a very interesting rock.

What we've seen from the lander camera is a good, what looks like a fairly fresh face, a fairly unoxidized face in the front, a flat top with soil piled up on the top. And we were very surprised when we drove the rover around to the back side of that rock and took stereo pictures of that rock from the back face it looked totally different and it looked different from all the other rocks at the landing site. It has what looks like protrusions lumping character to it, very different texture. In stereo, these things just pop out at you. And there are many things again that this could be: it could be pahoehoe, which is a type of lava in Hawaii that has this funny-looking shape to it. It could be what is called auto-brecciated lava, where lava as it's cooling, the top of it breaks up and busts up into pieces and it could have made this kind of shape. Other possibilities are sediments with big cobbles and somehow those have eroded down and they are left sticking up out of the rocks and weathered away.

So again, here is an example of something very intriguing that we want to go back to with the rover and look at it as close as we can get with the rover to see if we can see anymore use of texture to tell us what kind of rock this is. We didn't get very close last time, I think we were a couple meters away and we want to get like 25 centimeters away and take a better look.