Ok, time to take bets on whether the team heads East or West before turning back to the south.

From Sol 512:

West:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...XKP0733L0M1.JPG

East:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...XKP0634L0M1.JPG

I say West, as the dunes appear to be a bit less formidable and the etched terrain can be reached more quickly by angling to the WSW; but the lighting from the sun may be fooling me on the apparent height of the dunes. I really think they need to be traveling close to due south, staying between dune lines, and not crossing perpendicular to any more dunes than they absolutely have to.

West - Follow The Blueberry Road...

No time for betting. Oppy is heading East

http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/f/...Z0P1211R0M1.JPG

Cool, at last Oppy seems to be resolved again

These picture have no enough information in helping to select the best route. For me both are very similar. I think that the MERB team will take more overview pictures to get a much better vision of landform, inclusive with their height that is an important factor.

One thing that the crests runs more or less vertical to equatorial line and the winds comes from West. The way that Oppy must probably be runing in 90% of the time from north to south among valleys and sometime it must transverse crests on both sides.

If the MERB team decides to reach on Erbus eteched rocks in any way, it is like to sail on rough sea under a strong storm.... Hold firmely the timonel, otherwise, ignore it and visit for another interesting places or take a very long trip looking for a calmer sea of dunes. This is a good engineering lesson for MSL (better traction capability).

Rodolfo

It looks like they did a turn-in-place, dragging the stuck wheel (you can see the trench), rather than the three-point turns they've been doing lately.

I say head East, the westward route goes into worse-looking dunefields. I had an orbital MOC image that showed this, but I can't find it right away.

East, then south towards Victoria, with a stopover at Erebus.

--Bill

I *SUSPECT* what they are doing is driving 10 or so meters north, then taking pancam pans to the east and west that can be used together with pancam pans taken while stuck to get stereo-pairs of distant near-horizon structures with a 10 meter instead of 1/2 meter <or whatever> baseline. I've kept wondering why I never saw signs of them attempting long-baseline-stereo before, but they may be doing it now.

This is the Sol515 view toward the new direction (East); top is a PanCam partial stitch, bottom is NavCam rescaled stitch (3 pictures) with contours of PanCam portion:


Verical projection from PanCam complete mosaic (8 pixel/m scale):

A panoramic view taken on Sol 515 with the L2 Pancam.

jvandriel

Watching dilo's and jvandriel's wonderful panoramic views of the east route, makes me wonder. How are we going to go over those large dunes ? If we go directly East we will have to "cross" them at a ~90o angle.

In earlier Pancam pics it's already to see and now in your pans again. It's a question is this look because of the smaller dune in the foreground or is it another plane yonder that is different in its nature?

http://www.greuti.ch/oppy/eastplane.jpg

I suspect that Oppy is going to drive eastward and curve southward, along the path referred to as the the "Erebus Highway" (I _think_). She'll pick a path around the hazardous dunes and make it to the Victoria area sooner or later. Cautious navigation is the watchword nowadays.

--Bill

Here's a view using Phil-O-Vision
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug_im...riz_stretch.jpg

Part of the sloping is due to dodgy alignment of the frames.

Doug

Like the name, Doug... so of course I thought I'd have a crack at it too. This is from yours, not the original images, but I took a bit of curvature out of the horizon, turned it b/w and did a more extreme vertical stretch.

The general shape of the horizon can't be trusted here but the individual hills are real... except they are MUCH flatter in reality. But we can see there is some up-an-down inn the area, which explains why we don't really see Victoria or even Erebus properly.

Phil

Click to view attachment

I am sceptic with the selection of route toward East would be easier. According to the shown pictures, I see no real much difference going southward, westward and neither eastward.

All around would be very similar.

The trick to reach the Erebus is to stop, watch, study and go every short runs.

Rodolfo

From Squyers' Current Mission Update:

"No, we haven't decided to turn tail and run away from Erebus Crater! But after a careful study of all the images we have, we've concluded that the best way to map a path to the south is to start by going north a little bit, and taking some pictures off toward both the east and the west. Those images will complement ones we have already, and should allow us to plan the best possible southward path. So there'll be two or three drives to the north first, a lot of imaging, and then the long hard push south toward Erebus."

--Bill

There are now some "updates" of hazcam and navcam images on the exploratorium site, but they are older than on the jpl website (site 55xx).