Abstract
The Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landed in Gale crater (Mars) in August 2012. It has since been studying the lower part of the 5 km-high sedimentary pile that composes Gale’s central mound, Aeolis Mons. To assess the sedimentary record, the MSL team mainly uses a suite of imagers onboard the rover, providing various pixel sizes and fields of view from close to long-range observations. For this latter, we notably use the Remote Micro Imager (RMI), a subsystem of the ChemCam instrument that acts as 700 mm-focal length telescope, providing the smallest angular pixel size of the set of cameras on the Remote Sensing Mast. The RMI allows observations of remote outcrops up to a few kilometers away from the rover. As retrieving 3D information is critical to characterize the structures of the sedimentary deposits, we describe in this work an experiment aiming at computing for the first time with RMI Digital Outcrop Models of these distant outcrops. We show that Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry can successfully be applied to suitable sets of individual RMI frames to reconstruct the 3D shape and relief of these distant outcrops. These results show that a dedicated set of observations can be envisaged to characterize the most interesting geological features surrounding the rover.
Highlights
Gale crater on Mars records a large section of sedimentary rocks, mainly represented by the 5-km-thick sequence of Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons)
We propose for the first-time to create Digital Outcrop Models (DOM) of remote outcrops using the long-distance imagery from Remote Micro Imager (RMI)’s telescope
SfM photogrammetry has been recently used to propose high-resolution DOM of several areas studied by Curiosity [12,18,32,33], but these only concern outcrops that have been “physically” traversed by the rover
Summary
Gale crater on Mars records a large section of sedimentary rocks, mainly represented by the 5-km-thick sequence of Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons). Due to traversability issues and resources/time optimization constraints, the rover cannot access specific zones despite their scientific interest Their exploration solely relies on orbital data complemented by remote imaging by the rover from several hundreds of meters up to several kilometers, using onboard cameras (Mastcam, RMI [8]). Orbital data combined with rover-based observations revealed that the sulfate-bearing unit coincides with a major change of depositional environments followed by alternation of wet and dry conditions rather than a monotonous aridification during the Hesperian epoch [11] This distant area has not yet been reached by the rover, so current observations were notably supported using long-distance imaging capabilities of the RMI sub-system of the ChemCam instrument. The use of this technique to produce 3D models of remote geological exposures might have critical implication in helping to assess and to characterize the paleoenvironmental record studied with the Curiosity rover
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