Starship Asterisk*

Stephen Clark of Astronomy Now wrote:
NASA has released the first high-resolution aerial colour image of the Opportunity rover’s landing site on a sprawling Martian plain, where the airbag-cushioned robot fortuitously rolled into a Eagle Crater in January 2004, putting its scientific instruments face-to-face with a block of sedimentary rock that gave ground teams confirmation Mars was once a warmer, wetter, and habitable planet.

Ann wrote:Disregarding the sedimantary rock, which isn't obvious in the picture I posted, I'm interested in the colors of the picture at left. The ejecta made by the rover, at upper right, is light yellowish in color, whereas the overall color of the Martian soil where it touched down is dark grayish brown.

What is the light yellow color due to? Is it iron oxide?

[c][imghover=https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/im ... _hires.jpg]https://mars.nasa.gov/imgs/2017/04/mars ... gA-br2.jpg[/imghover]MER Opportunity's Landing Hardware at Eagle Crater, Mars
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona[/c]

A new observation from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captures the landing platform that the rover Opportunity left behind in Eagle Crater more than 13 years and 27 miles (or 44 kilometers) ago.

A series of bounces and tumbles after initial touchdown plunked the airbag-cushioned lander into the crater, a mere 72 feet (22 meters) across, on Jan. 25, 2004, Universal Time (Jan. 24, PST).

The scene includes Eagle Crater and Opportunity's nearby parachute and backshell, from the April 10, 2017, observation by MRO's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera.

This is the first color view from HiRISE of the Eagle Crater scene. ...