As I see it - they have two options. Drive in and hope to leave. Suicide drive in expecting to stay - or Remote observation only.

Seing as the IDD isnt going to be able to reach the interesting stuff that's on the very steap eastern wall - I doubt they'll drive in - but that's just my opinion.

Take your pick.


Doug

They may have a chance to do some good science around the rim. I have a feeling they will be here for at least a dozen sols, if not two dozen.

I'm glad they finally made it here...the question is, where to from here once they're done??? Whole lot of nothing out there much different than what they've seen between Eagle and Endurance.

Eric P / MizarKey

I think I remember some features on the horizon being photographed. Perhaps Opportunity could head towards these. It would be interesting to study some feature that is NOT an impact crater besides Anatolia.

Ted

Like was said, the interesting stuff is unreachable in any case.

But maybe the layers below them are interesting too, showing what was there before the water came. But sacrificing the rest of the mission for this one sample? I don't think so.

After that...heat shield imapct site is rather close by...
But first a long stay!

also there seems to be some kind of trench on the upper right side (from the DIMES and MOC images that is) of the crater. But it will get there anyway, driving around the crater.

[I hope I'm not seeing things here. I hate when people do that...)

I think Opportunity is going to be at Endurance Crater for a long time. After all, it spent five Martian weeks at the outcrop in Eagle Crater, and that's not a patch on what's on offer here. They'll probably take two weeks just circumscribing Endurance.

As for what next, plans were (link) after Endurance to go south to investigate some "etched terrain" (link), though that is quite some distance to the south (at least 5 km, I think, though perhaps not as rough a jaunt as what Spirit is doing, considering).

It seems obvious from how Squyres was talking at the press briefing yesterday that they are *seriously* considering driving into Endurance. Those layers that lie below the high-sulphur whitish-rock layers are just too great of a temptation for Steve and his cohorts, I think. (I believe I'm going to start calling the whitish rock units "evaporation layers," since their high levels of sulphur and their high but inconsistent levels of such elements as bromine mark them as having been formed or altered during the evaporation of the body of water that used to overlie the plains.)

Now, I'm not positive that I see the extension onto lower-slope wall units of the darker, pre-evaporation layers that Squyres was talking about yesterday. I see something that could be mistaken for such an extension but that seems more obviously to be a portion of the rim that has collapsed into the crater. It's a scalloped-edge feature on the near wall to the right of the current panorama. But the edge of that feature, while it appears to continue the deep bedding that's visible a little further on, actually is the edge of a rim collapse. All we're going to see there, I'm afraid, is the basaltic sand that covers the evaporation layers out on the plains.

At least Squyres was pretty definite that Opportunity will be sent out onto the plains to check out the cracks and dimples (and maybe even some of the fretted terrain to the south) before being committed to a potentially suicidal entry into Endurance. And I was glad to hear that the heat shield impact point is targeted for a visit, too. It just seems to me that the heat shield had to dig a deeper hole than any trenching operation could generate. It will be very instructive to see if it penetrated through the evaporation rock layer or not (though, if that layer is as thick as it appears in Endurance's walls, I'd say that was highly doubtful).

Doug
dvandorn@NOSPAM.mn.rr.com

Looks as if I was right - so far 24 sols at Endurance and only halfway around (though admittedly probably more than halfway through).