The varied textures of the Victoria Crater walls

A remarkable pictures of the walls of Victoria Crater on Mars taken by the Opportunity Rover in March 2007. You have to click on the picture to see the large image and thus be able to make out the layering in the rocks. The layers exposed are really interesting because the lowest layers look like thousand of thin layers but they are not all running parallel to each other. On earth this is indicative of sediments laid down in sand dunes or possibly at the edge of a lake. Above this relatively uniform red rock is a layer which shows up much lighter and seems to have been the upper layers of rock present when a meteorite crashed in the ground creating this whole. The layers above this whitish later have similar teture to the lower layers but look like they are made of blocks of rock at various angles. See how the layers in the rock are consistently parallel within each block but between blocks they don't line up at all. It would appear that these are the remnants of the rocks thrown out of the hole created by the meteorite and so just fell in a large jumble. What is really interesting is how what seems to have been an original jumble of rocks has been completely smoothed off at the surface presumably by eons of wind action.

Below is another close up of the rock wall showing the various texture in the rocks. Click on images for much large view