Well, it isn't yet midnight here, so maybe I will sneak in under the wire. Since the analyses I've tried have been inconclusive, I am going with my gut feelings. I jump off the fence and ready my light sabre to defend the far side from the dark side. I will follow The Force.

BTW, whose midnight defines the deadline?

edited: I guess that should have actually been "who's."

Hi Cosmic Rocker

Shaka said "I support closing the Beacon voting tonight. But it'll take until Tuesday for everyone else to express their opinion on doing so."

So I will follow what Shaka says and make it 11:59 PM Pacific Time Tuesday Night and Let the Game begin at Midnight but this means another 3 more days of voting and I don't want Stu or Oersted beating me with a Bobby Pin or an Ustrax evaporite?

In my post #516 above I showed a sol 830 image of the beacon, merged from two pancams and vertically stretched. When I compare that with a scene from sol 796, processed the same way, there is absolutely no parallax between Beacon and the markings below it on the slope. (edit, actually a very small parallax, but you expect that).

This has two possible interpretations (I can't think of any more, maybe someone else can):

1. Beacon is at the top of the near rim and the other markings are quite close to it, so no parallax.

2. Beacon is at the top of the far rim. The slope we see is the inside wall of Victoria just below Beacon, quite close so no parallax. We can't see the near rim at all, it's in a depression.


What I think it does exclude is the possibility that Beacon is one high spot on the far rim poking up above the near rim. I think there is enough movement between 796 and 830 to make that clear.



So it's a choice between 1 and 2. I just can't believe the far rim would look like that. It should be a continuous irregular cliff. I have to prefer option 1.

Phil

Click to view attachment

PS finally I've been promoted! my 1000th post. I'm supposed to be gardening but I managed to sneak indoors!

(another edit... just overlaying points on the map. It's unfortunate that the route has been so close to the line of site to Beacon... you really wouldn't get very much parallax anyway. Go sideways a bit, drivers! - maybe this isn't so convincing after all)... but this will change soon. Corner crater has a very different viewpoint.

Taking a vote to inhibit voting? This is democracy of the strangest kind....

This is not like democracy, this is like a horse race. We must stop taking bets before the race is over. People making bets toward the end of the race will have an advantage. Our voting will not change which rim beacon is on.

Yawwwnn! Good Morning, G'Day, Buon Giorno, Guten Morgen,
Bonjour, Aloha,
Another Group reply:
Bobby, Hang in there, boy! We'll get this election done equitably if it kills you.

CosRok, Glad you eased off that fence intact. I'm sorry about your choice, but I'm intrigued that you use the phrase "my gut feeling" to explain it. Quite a few others have used a similar term, but IIRC always Far-Rimmers. It seems that the near-rimmers always offer calculations or observations to explain it. Dare I suggest that we are seeing a dichotomy of our members according to their relative reliance on intuition versus reasoning? Of course "majority rules" is a nonsense to true science, but this poll should be an informative lesson on the more reliable path to scientific truth.

Phil, nice analysis as befits a Near-rimmer - one more layer of reasoning in defiance of the intuitive feeling that a Beacon should be remote and beyond reach.
Congratulations on your seniority. Perseverance always pays off. Just be careful of those 'quickie' indoor posts; up where you live, one mistimed post could make you miss the growing season altogether.

Kenny votes Nay on cutting off voting.

Antoniseb votes Yea on cutting off voting, even though "This is not like democracy..." He has already made the correct choice, yet "People making bets toward the end of the race will have an advantage." Who exactly is racing? The Beacon is already there!

I beg to differ - I proudly claim prior art on the concept of "gut feeling" for the Near Rim team.

Should we vote on who used the term first?

Uh oh. I see that IDRC in this case. Serves me right for relying on a "gut feeling", instead of going back through all previous posts to tally the actual data. QED. I never meant to imply that you lack a gut or feelings in it, helvick, merely that your principal reliance is on observation. Your actual statement was IIRC (no! bad science! look it up!) "My gut feel is that the parallax changes make this look like the near rim". I submit that parallax changes are observations not intuitions, and you were relying on your eyes, not your viscera. Parallax people are (careful) primarily on the Near Rim.
But perhaps we should vote on this?

Touché.
No vote required - clearly I belong with the empiricals rather than the intuitives, I surrender the term.
But not the vote. I'm sticking with my near side buddies.

Well, after spending (wasting?) all Sunday morning working on this problem in true Mars geek style, I see Phil has scooped me! Here's what I've come up with. To summarize: Far-siders, be afraid. Be very afraid. Near siders, rejoice!

After pointing out in my last post that there wasn't enough parallax with the L/R pancam separation to settle this, it occured to me (and Phil!) that the greatest horizontal parallax along the route is actually much greater - several tens of metres actually. So I found the two sols that maximized the parallax. As you can see from this route map they are sols 809 and 816 (the yellow lines terminate at those sols' positions; green dots are positions for all sols for which the beacon was visible):
Click to view attachment
You can also see from that map the parallax displacement that must occur between features on the near and far rims when you flip between the sol 809 and 816 views - it's just the separation between the two yellow lines on the near rim, which is about 20 metres. At the sol 816 distance, that corresponds to about 65 pancam pixels.

So I took the sol 809 pancam of the beacon, enlarged it by 15% so the image scale matched that of the sol 816 pic (on sol 809 Oppy was 15% farther from the near rim than on 816). I then made a flicker gif of the two images. I also added white dots to show how much parallax the beacon would have had if it had been on the far rim, based on the 65 pixel value from above. The result is clear:
Click to view attachment
You can see that even though the dark features are vague, a 65 pixel shift would have been completely obvious! There's a small shift of the beacon relative to the dark streak to the left, but that's entirely consistent with the fact that the dark streak extends quite a bit closer to us than the rim edge.

Conclusion: the beacon is on the near rim, and quite close to the edge. We have plenty of parallax already to prove it. This method is different from Tesheiner's, and the results are stronger I think. The beacon's not obvious on the orbital map because it's not tall/steep enough to cast shadows.

Here's an analglyph version of the flicker gif. You can see that had the beacon been on the far rim (white dots) it would've looked much farther away:
Click to view attachment

That's us Far Rimmers told then!

No, seriously, excellent work, very impressed.

Just a shame you're wrong!

Just kidding. I can't question tech work like that, all I have is that old "gut feeling" and a sense that it should be the Far Rim (or else I'll have to re-write "Meridiani Messenger"! ), and if you're proved right then cause for Near Rimmer rejoicing indeed.

I genuflect. If Sherlock Holmes were still alive, he would weep tears of pride.

I must add that the little green dots on my map are due to the spectacular work of Tesheiner in letting us all know where we are!

And that reminds me, on a more general note, how much I think it says about these missions when I slip and say things like "letting us all know where we are"! These missions are so immersive that I often feel like the maps show me where I am, not just the rovers!

Very nice bit of work, fredk.

Where's that bubbly?

Phil

That's a lot of great work Fred, but I fear you are manipulating date beyond the tolerances these images afford.

Like the old joke, it's like climbing up a stepladder to get a better look at the moon. Theoretically it's valid, but there just isn't enough well-defined data yet for these kinds of "measurements".

Sorry, but as the captain of the FAR SIDE team I have to step in here before your efforts gain any momentum.

Fredk:

Let me get this right: The little dots are far away, but the big dots look closer because, er... ...would that be an ecumenical matter?

Bob 'Jack' Shaw

I think you've got it all wrong. I prefer to consider our reasoning as mutli-dimensional or multivariate logic, if you know what I mean. We far-rimmers see a larger vista as we attempt to elucidate the wonders of the universe, downloading all the available data into our multi-threaded processors and sizeable memories.

Well, hopefully you folks on the opposite side will take all of that with a grain of salt. To be honest, the facts that weighed most heavily in my decision are the following:

• The precision of the geometric data has been questioned by knowledgeable individuals.
• The MER team favors the far side.
• They have better data, and possibly MRO imagery of sweet Victoria.
• I have a gut feeling...

I guess the fact that the curtain was falling and that I had to make a snap decision about which side to jump to may have played an insignificant role.

Ah go on. The Beacon's on the Near Side? I don't belieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeve it!

This whole near/far thing is getting a bit silly.

There will be arguments just as lengthy about which bit of rock we were ACTUALLY seing once resolved more closely.

Voting closes at 2359UT today (just over 17 hrs) - time to wrap it up - and then someone can start their own thread to argue to death the outcome over the next few months.

Doug

Yes indeed voting on the near/far side beacon closes today at 11:59 Pacific Time djellison. according to me who lives on the West Coast of the US. We should have another 23 hours to vote or Midnight Tuesday

This forum is run on UT. The Voting closes at mignight UT. Debate over that time and further discussion will just get culled, it's reduced to a complete farce ove rthe past few days and I'm drawing it to a close. Time for some dictatorship I don't want to, but if I have to I'll just close the thread to stop it getting quite so childish. Fun and games are all well and good, but this was going around in pointless circles.

Doug has spoken.

I made a movie over a bunch of sols showing the approach to Victoria. The view centers on the beacon.

No, I don't want to draw any conclusions from that, but feel free to analyze.

Enjoy!

I'm doing, fredk! Congrats for this work.



Well, the basics are the same: parallax.

Thanks Pando!

I get the impression that some other bright dots appear close to the beacon. As I am a far-rimmer there can be only one explanation: They must be far rim features so far hidden by the near rim

Michael

Fair enough Doug. Beacon can wait.

Going back to the original topic of this thread (which I started about a billion years ago, it seems now! Ah, the carefree, innocent, pre-Beacon days of making a model with a cereal bowl and Blu Tac!) has anyone had any thoughts on what the VC outcrops will appear like? Can we draw any conclusions on how tall/layered/eroded they will be, based on what we saw in Endurance?

What else will we see in there? Well, Endurance has to be our best template for this - and I know it's not perfect, thanks to different scale, processes, location etc - and we all remember the stunning things we found there. So, based on that, here are some "I'd Like To See" suggestions:

* larger versions of "brain rock" Wopmay (one of my faves) seen on the crater's slopes/floor...

* one or more meteorites spotted sitting on the crater floor's rippled dust dunes...

* at least one tall, stable outcrop showing lots n lots of luvverly layers...

* at least one "gully" meandering down from the rim and down to the floor...

* a great big shattercone...

Anyone else got a wish list?

Stu, (and All)

Topic is "Victoria and her features". I think there is no question that we're going to Corner Crater and I believe we'll all "forget" VC very soon when CC will be close enough. My question is : do we consider Corner crater as Victoria's or do we consider it on Topic "moving South to Victoria" or do we open a new trait? As I favor the first option and as I believe we'll be there for a while, we'd better consider/compare what we'll see in VC and in CC. In my opinion we already can see some outcrops on the oposite side of CC that "could" correspond to the end of the smooth terrain surrounding VC and created by the impact. It's up to you my BBQ mates

Good question! Personally, as a) it's not actually physically connected to VC, it is "on the way" to VC, and c) this thread is becoming rather large now, I'd be in favour of discussing CC in the "Moving south" thread or giving it its own thread altogether, but that's just me.

Like you I can't wait to see some detail at CC (I don't think we'll just "forget" VC when we get there tho! ) and already we're seeing hints of details, so fingers crossed we start moving again soon.

Until I rigourously settled the matter, Doug!

I do, but I promised I wouldn't use the F-word in mixed company.
If we got that, a poem wouldn't be enough, Stu. You'd have to write a Saga!

Corner Crater may be very interesting, as a very fresh crater right on the apron of an older one, but I wouldn't be surprised if the PIs say "we didn't come to Mars to study the cratering process; we can do that at leisure on Earth." Craters are interesting only insofar as they provide trapdoors down into Mars' geologic past, and Corner may not get us down below the units we studied in Endurance. Victoria almost certainly will.
I don't expect a lengthy stay in Corner.

[quote name='Shaka' date='May 29 2006, 08:19 PM' post='56210']
I wouldn't be surprised if the PIs say "we didn't come to Mars to study the cratering process; we can do that at leisure on Earth." Craters are interesting only insofar as they provide trapdoors down into Mars' geologic past, and Corner may not get us down below the units we studied in Endurance. Victoria almost certainly will.
I don't expect a lengthy stay in Corner.

That's a good argument Shaka, but I don't buy it because we have NOT such experience on Mars. This will be something new. I think that this is the reason they are driving by (I mean, not only because it's Tesh's route but I also agree that they could decide very quickly after a few picts and mesurements that VC's got more interests...since we still can have a look at CC when we'll exit VC on Sol 2048 (or so).

It's nice to find an optimistic Frenchman, Climb. I couldn't imagine any rover driver would sail past a crater without at least one good look inside, but then I didn't think they would sail past that ejecta (?) rockpile the other day. Some of those drivers keep their eyes on the road!

I say that after Doug's loud speak, which I agree with at least for a while , we're forgeting one recent very interesting news : beacon is multiple. Since we're stucked, it could be a few days without more Pancam views in this direction but anyway, I'm a bit suprised that our "pics specialists" don't come up with any sort of enhanced-strechted-deconvolutioned-L7 new pict of the multiple beacon. I'm sorry I can light up a BBQ but I'm still a bit useless working out pictures. Time will come (yes Shaka, I'm a optimistic Frenchman)

It's even nicer to find a Frenchman who can light a BBQ!
I can open a bottle of wine! Several.

...17,386 bottles of wine on the wall...

[quote name='Shaka' date='May 29 2006, 11:14 PM' post='56230']
It's even nicer to find a Frenchman who can light a BBQ!
I can open a bottle of wine! Several.

...[i]17,386 bottles of wine on the wall...[/i]


So we need you join the BBQ party Shaka. We need you badly...

Here is another animation, this time with 4x stretch applied, and running faster forward and backward. Although the resolution is poor, it appears that the foreground rim is moving around relative to the beacon, leading me to believe that the beacon is more distant than the near rim. Put your media player in a loop and sit back and observe the dark features in the near rim below the beacon - they jump back and forth (parallax) and the beacon does not.

Back in July 1992 I took a vacation trip to Northern Arizona and decided to visit Meteor Crater near Flagstaff Arizona. To me it was one of the most amazing sight's I have ever seen. The power of one rock and all the damage it caused. No pictures can even come close to what I remember of the crater. I can only imagine what Oppy will see when she arrives at Victoria. If anyone ever gets a chance to visit Meteor Crater. Do it.

Bobby

I need a new name. Any Advise?

Bobby:

Avoid 'Bob' - it's taken!

Bob Shaw

Try "The other boB"

Constable?

Shirley?

PS: Sorry, I just couldn't resist.

Robert is a good short-hand name for a Bob

Kenny

Pollster?
Warmonger?

You'd better open up a new topic Bobby (mind if I call you Bobby?)

Beacon on the horizon!

And it looks like the sponge's gonna dry...:

http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b14/ustrax3/beacon10.jpg

To me it looks the stuff composing the beacon falls out on this side of the crater...

ustrax,

That is the worst Magic Eye picture I've ever seen...!!!

As I look at your image with an arrow pointing to the "beacon" on the left it occurs to me that there may have been some misunderstanding. My far rim pick refers to the beacon on the RIGHT!

On a more serious note, is it possible that the line I have drawn represents the near rim horizon and the left and right beacons are a continuous far rim cliff that is interupted by the prominent rise on the near rim? The broken off pieces you refer to are slabs of evaporite on the near rim rise and the bright beacons are in the distance.
Click to view attachment

Amazing hypothesis, centsworth! This would means that we have no winner for the beacon controversy!
Below the left+right merge for Sol844 and the corresponding stretched/processed version:
Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment
Amazing triangular shape... about "phantoms" immediaytely to the right of beacon, they seems real because appear in both original images!

Hey enough of that! Are you guys trying to help the Nearsighted in their attempts to save face now that the truth is becoming clearer every day? The "beacon" is now, and has always been, the bright white object, and even if it now starts to resolve itself into multiple sections with some near side dark matter merging in, we shall not surrender clear title to the Beacon Cup without a fight. Anyone who feels otherwise is IMHO not sponge-worthy.

Brian