I'm guessing that they will never do over about 60-70m in a day from now on, Purgatory spooked them out of those really long drives.

I think that they will tend to drive conservatively, but will make good time on this drive. It seems to me that the sand in these ripples is fairly firm and may get better as Oppy travels south. I'm thinking that she will get into a few Sols of deeper and looser sand once she clears "Heck of a View Hill" but it will improve as Victoria is approached. I have no idea what the ejecta blanket will be like to drive upon, I hope it won't be basalt boulders.

--Bill

60-70m is more than enough for me!
I did my estimation for arrival at Victoria based on an average 20m/driving sol.

IIRC, Purgatory like situations are not directly related to the distance but to the driving mode. If I'm not wrong they are using Visodom since then, even on those 70m drives, right?

Lookin' South, Sol 774:

Looks like the rover won't stop driving 'till the weekend... Today (sol 775) is planned as driving sol.

My wild guess for the next move: some 40-70m heading due south.

Click to view attachment (294k)
(Sol 774 pancam L2)

Well, she's done moved again...your guess may be right or she may be a slot over to the east, can't tell...

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...DLP0705L0M1.JPG

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...D8P1205R0M1.JPG

YES ! keep on rolling, old Lady

They should be playing some country songs about truck drivers for Oppy's wake up calls lately...

"Amarillo by morning..."

It looks to me like Opportunity is in the same slot. On the latest route map, there is a white area near the South end of the blow up. You can see on the horizon to the SSE some hill-tops which I take to be the dark mounds one or two hundred meters below the blow up box.

Sorry, I'm not good enough with images yet to show you what I mean.

I never thought I'd say this, but WOW this terrain is monotonous. I feel like we're driving across Iowa. I sure hope things liven up once we get to the Corn Palace...

Sol 775, South:

Here are some views just for fun. Apparantly the boredom of the trip is affecting me:

Sol 775:


Sol 766:


Sol 765:


Sol 762:


And so on... I might try putting a movie or slideshow together of these sometime. All views are facing South, by the way.

Exactly! A bit to the left (east).
A quick calculation results in a 40-50m move.

Click to view attachment (218k)

I'll take free-wheeling across the plains over shuffling my feet in the hills anyday.

Brian

75,000 bottles of beer on the wall, 75,000 bottles of beer.
Y'take one down and pass it around, leaves 74,999 bottles of beer.

74,999 bottles of beer on the wall, 74,999 bottles of beer.
Y'take one down and pass it around, leaves 74,998 bottles of beer.

74,998....

Hey, Iowa is not this flat. Looks more like Nebraska to me.

Not more monotonous than on the way to Erebus. On March 22, 2005 "in the middle of nowhere" that was monotonous http://www.greuti.ch/oppy/nowhere2.jpg

Isn't this the famous "Etched Terrain" that looked so interesting -- not to mention difficult and dangerous -- from way up high?

I notice we're not using the term "Etched Terrain" any more. Perhaps it no longer seems appropriate for gently rolling dunes with the occasional exposed flat bedrock?

Not so much monotonous as it is predictable. This makes for quick travel, although it might breed complacency. The flat, flat, flat horizon suggests to me that we are looking past this plain to the far horizon past Victoria. The bumps on the near horizon are the ripples we've seen at "Heck of a View Hill" so once we get past them we'll see Victoria better.

--Bill

That's a lot better than kids screaming in the back saying "Are we there yet?" in grating whiny tones. Something I last experienced (and was guilty of) as a kid myself.

74,997 bottles of beer on the wall, 74,997 bottles of beer.........lol.......I think or at least hope that Victoria Crater will be well worth the wait.

I saw it better on the Anandtech forums:

n bottles of beer on the wall
n bottles of beer
Take one down, pass it around
n-1 bottles of beer on the wall

We must not forget the brave mountaineers that gave their all in the attempt:
Return To Thick Air...

Not the sandhills part at least, it's a lot more rugged than this. I suggest coastal Texas. "All you can see is miles and miles" as the texan said.

tty

Gentlemen, Let us all observe a moment of silence in loving sympathy for our brethren who must dwell where the local horizon is demarcated by the tops of roofs, telephone poles and McDonald's arches.
There, but for the Grace of the Almighty...

Isn't there a gosub or something missing?

Bob Shaw

Recursion is neater surely:

BottlesOfBeerOnTheWall(79999);

sub BottlesOfBeerOnTheWall {
$n=shift();
print "$n Bottles of beer on the wall.\n$n Bottles of beer.\nTake one down, pass it around\n";
BottlesOfBeerOnTheWall($n-1) if ($n > 0);
}

Stack Overflow at....

Can someone put this into PHP


I believe the stack overflow is due to attempting to put 80,000 bottles onto a single wall. Either youv'e got to have the Great Wall of China involved, or we're going to have a stack overflow

Doug

Personally I’d vote for Kansas as flattest state in the union http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2003/jul/27/h...hotcakes_study/

Except, no, wait, what’s this ? Florida ??

http://www.answerbag.com/q_view.php/33052

I guess I can see that, although I still think North Dakota deserves consolation points for being both mind-numbingly flat and bitterly cold.

Steve

Heh heh... North Dakota works for me. Having just lived through another Minnesota winter, I no longer seriously think I'd want to live on Mars, I'm afraid. Too darn cold. Then again, I suppose the wonder of exploring a different planet might make up for it... possibly. Brrrr.

Here is a Slideshow of the trip South from Erebus, so far. I'll try to keep this updated as time allows... ?

Thanks, that was pretty informative. I look forward to seeing the future versions of this.

Overflow at five beers.

Sol 776 drive images are available: http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportu...cam/2006-03-31/

That was a "short" drive; just 11m eastwards, enough to cross to the next ripple.

Click to view attachment (209k)
Original image: http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportu...DLP0705L0M1.JPG

99 bottles in PHP
and 99 bottles of beer in more than 900 programming languages :-)

I am, as ever, delighted by the communal UMSF ability to stretch a joke well beyond breaking point, especially without mentioning (eeek!) the GOTO word.

But who cleans up all them 9999 bottles?

Bob Shaw

I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet:

99 bottles of Lipovitan on the wall.....

...and as they take one down and pass it around,
their probe crashes onto an asteroid!



-the other Doug

The complete 360 degree panoramic view on the way to Victoria.

Taken on Sol 776 with the L0 navcam.

jvandriel

Bedrock on the way to Victoria.

Mosaic taken with the L2 pancam on Sol 777.

jvandriel

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...J9P0675L0M1.JPG

Here is jvandriel's sol 776 pan in two circular versions. I did some cosmetic work on the horizon in the first one only.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Click to view attachment

Mars Rover Update from The Planetary Society

March 31, 2006

http://www.planetary.org/news/2006/0331_Ma...ate_Spirit.html

I am a little confused by the comments from Arvidson about not 'deploying' the arm as they are, in fact, deploying it every day.

They are unstowing it, but not deploying it.

The article is wrong though...
"Opportunity -- which has kept its IDD stowed since leaving Erebus" - not true, they've just not deployed it to do science.

Doug

Doug,

APPARENTLY YOU CANNOT UNSTOWE YOUR IDD either !!!! The count of your posts is blocked at 3988 for a while ...welcome to Mars
Edit : Oups, after several 3988, I noticed a 3989. IDD DID you DID IDD ID?

more interesting stuff along the way...
Now whats the story with the strange stained-on stripe running over the dune, right next to a bunch of cracks. at the top of the dune you can see how the slope changes right at the intersection of the stripe! It almost looks like a bad pano stitch exposure artifact, whats funny is that it has smoothed out some features that continue outside of the stripe!
the discoloration might be related to... (baffled!)

And right there intersecting the dark stripe is a very small mini-crater.

The stripe bewildered me too, atomoid. A whimsical thought I had was that it resembled the filled-in track of a previous rover. Seriously though, it seems to be somehow related to the bedrock fractures and the other ("sapping features," mini-craters, etc.) that we have been speculating about for some time. There appear to be some slope changes associated with the edges of this stripe. Maybe if we collect enough of these oddities, all of the pieces will eventually come together into some kind of coherent picture. "Curiouser and curiouser," cried Alice.

Just had a thought that this actually looks like it could have been caused by a areologically recent uplift/subsidence faulting event (due to sapping, seismic changes, or what have you) that has since been mostly weathered over. Here's why:

- To the left of the stripe the ground has subsided relative to where at the right of the stripe the ground has elevated (this explains the sand dune angle at the leftmost edge of the stripe and does not appear inconsistent with the rest of the stripe feature, even the next dune beyond has a slight uplift at the stripe boundary).

- The small crack in the foreground is consistent with the edge of the fault.

- If this were signs of a fault, it seems to go right under the rover so it should also be visible on the other side. I think there is some sign of it also here "over the Rover's right shoulder"™. There is even a bit of a stripe going off perhaps its a small uplift. You can also see some more disturbed plates in the same line here as well.

- Empty plate boundary cracks: This might account for a "disturbance" that must have been responsible for all the drained cracks to the left and the right of the fault. They do seem out of place in that the cracks are emptied, perhaps vibration/settling best explains this. Its odd how there is a lot of 'tossed' pebbles right around the cracks, could the activity be so violent as to spall rock fragments out of the cracks (not just swallow existing materials) otherwise its kind of odd, i cant quite picture escaping CO2 hissing out of these cracks and throwing stones around. not quite yet at least (sudden gas escape causing catastophic subsidence)...

here are the anaglyphs over left shoulder and over right shoulder

...something must be disturbing these plates. Worm sign?

Yes. I was thinking along these lines, while driving (roving) home today. I'm really obsessed by these dunes!

I can't picture how a dune flows over a crack in bedrock without filling it in. So maybe these are old dunes which "cracked" when the bedrock shifted or settled (sink hole effect?). Could rocks be tossed up in one third G. ?