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Pluto_and_Charon OP t1_it10bd9 wrote

They are sedimentary, yes. In a lake bed setting, imagine clay particles settling out of suspension and forming a thin layer of mud ontop of the original rock. Now imagine that the lake persists for a million years, that deposit of mud on the lake floor has now grown hundreds of metres thick.

Billions of years later, the rover visits the site. The lake water is long dried up and that mud has turned into stone, which has been heavily eroded. The rover landed at the lowest point in the crater, where you can see where that very first layer of mud sitting ontop of the original rock. Therefore, we first encountered mud formed at the very beginning of the lake's history. In the years since, the rover has driven steadily uphill, climbing through sequentially higher mud layers and so 'further in time'. So, as the rover ascends upwards, we see progressively younger layers. We are now at the time when the lake dried up.

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SenorTron t1_it2axsy wrote

What processes have eroded the deposited layers away since then, and why is it more eroded in the center of the crater?

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Pluto_and_Charon OP t1_it2tte0 wrote

Good question! We believe at one point the sand dunes we're starting to see actually eventually completely buried the crater - which is several kilometres deep and 150km wide so quite a huge volume of sand! However, almost all of that sand has now been completely scoured away by wind over the past 3 billion years, exposing the ancient lake sediments underneath for us to study. The exact center of the crater is actually the least eroded, that's why the central peak mountain, Aeolis Mons (aeolis is latin for wind!) is so much taller than the crater floor, it's 5.5km high. It's this mountain that the rover is climbing up. In fact it's so tall its a bit of a puzzle, we're not sure why the sand formations didn't erode here.

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