I was able to clean this image up.

This is what the beacon REALLY is.

Relax, Brian, no need to fear we will use the dark side of the beacon to claim a partial victory. Why should we be content with part of the prize? ALL of the beacon - white and dark - is safely and permanently on the Near Side, where the laws of physics and mathematics require it to be. There will be no need to share, unless you generously share your embarrassment and pain with the fence straddlers.
You will all be put to work afterward, building the shrubbery tribute we demand!

The Knights Who Say "Near"

Decepticon:

You want we should face the facts, then?

Bob Shaw

OFGSB Castor! Ice water alert!!
Decepticon, we note duly your choice of handle! Besides, you forgot her afro.

Nice work, but is she reclining on the NEAR rim or the FAR rim? We need to have a vote! Shirley...er...Bobby?

The eye and chin are on the near side, the nose and forehead are on the far side.

We are not amused.

Yeah, fer shurr! And they've stayed exactly lined up over ten weeks of travelling! Gimme a break!
You're a sensible guy, cents, how can you be on the Far rim? This is like taking candy from a baby.

New details are just now starting to become evident that weren't visible weeks ago. So it's in the next weeks that we'll see how the new features move (or not) in relation to each other as the rover moves.

In any case, I suppose the near rimmers could start a new contest: what sol will the first view of the far rim occur. It will be interesting to see how clear cut the first view of the far rim is. Will it be obvious to all that the far rim has made an appearance or will there be a weeks-long period of debate until, slowly, it becomes evident that the far rim is in sight. Of course if the far rimmers are correct, the latter is already the case.

[quote name='centsworth_II' date='Jun 12 2006, 06:55 AM' post='58035']
the near rimmers could start a new contest: what sol will the first view of the far rim occur.

Shaka,

OFGSB? That's a new one on me and isn't in the Net lingo database. Give me a clue and I'll prepare the water....

Castor

It's not global netspeak (yet), but exclusive to UMSF:" Oh, for goodness' sake, Bob". Doug's suggested rejoinder to what some of us call The English Disease, the apparently irresistable urge in some Englishmen ( and, it would seem, sassenachs and pommies) to concoct puns on whatever happens or is said, in rapid, relentless succession, no matter how lame, laboured or atrocious the result.
I suggest we set up an alert scale - Condition Green, Yellow or Red - depending on the evident risk of a full-scale pun attack. Yellow would require you to melt a bucket of icewater; Red would require you to warm up your snowmobile, ready for a 'scramble' departure to Glasgow.

After months of observation, cents, admittedly from a considerable distance, my straining eyes have detected no glimpse of the far rim. It is therefore below our sightline across the near rim, but I have no way of knowing how far below it is. If it is well below, we may not sight it until we are within a few meters of the near rim. Of course we are most likely to sight it first at the lowest point of the near rim - perhaps through a notch like Boat Ramp.
I have no personal interest in trying to predict the date. I only bet on sure things (like Beacon), and nothing could be less sure than how soon we will negotiate the scary terrain ahead of us. I will be satisfied if we get there at all.

Shaka:

It's just one of the many benefits of a good Scottish education. And speaking English as one's native tongue. If you can't keep up, then perhaps some night classes would assist?

Bob Shaw

I do welcome this information, Bob; I have long wondered whether it was a hereditary or learned trait. During my years in Australian academia, I lost count of the number of serious and interesting scientific discussions in the Tea Room that dissolved into chaos and giggles, when one or two of our English-expatriot faculty suddenly and without warning succumbed to the 'bug'. No line of logic, however compelling, can transcend a pair of 'deuling punsters'. My secret fear was that a genetic trait could infiltrate the gene pool in other countries, rendering the greatest setback to the progress of human understanding since the Tower of Babel.


I have long abandoned trying to keep up, Bob. I still keep my Shorter Oxford on the bookshelf as a momento and affectionate curtsy to Betty's Commonwealth, but I no longer bother to insert U's after O's or any of the other extraneous, bandwidth-wasting letters which "a good Scottish education" (at the point of a bayonet) retains.
Alas, I have no time for night classes in English these days (I'm too busy tutoring Ant in French.).

Increasing number of features visible, I'm still confused as to what we're seing.

After today's move the beacon is showing more detail than ever, with extended structure to the right:

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...DPP2428L2M1.JPG

That structure shows up in three independent pancam shots today. It might be interesting to see a summed version of those three shots...

It's a rock, Doug...

(sorry, I had to do that)

What I think we're seeing are far-rim evaporite blocks and bluffs showing through a scalloped gap in the near rim.

--Bill

The beacon ?

Maybe whe see the white cliffs of Dover.

jvandriel

Here is the pixel value average of the 3 frames showing the beacon on sol 848. It's fair to say this is the best look we've had of the beast yet.
Click to view attachment

Judging from my image above, the full width of the beacon outcrop spans 10 metres at the near-rim distance of 1000m (or 16 metres at the far rim).

It would make a nice little platform for Oppy to park on and take a pan of Victoria when it reaches the near rim!

I think this is what we're starting to see...

The white line which connects between the above and below pictures is not correctly lined-up.Click to view attachment

Rodolfo

You mean like this (see attached)?

Somehow I don't think it's plausible since it will put the beacon completely in a wrong place.

Now it is nicely lined-up. The color and shape of these lines match finely between both pictures. I am afraid that the beacon belongs to the mini-crater, ones with circle laying on side of the far rim.

Rodolfo

It was obvious from the start that Opportunity saw the bright far side of Endurance Crater when this image was taken from Eagle Crater. (original image rotated to straighten horizon)
Click to view attachment

But what if Opportunity had been as far away from the Endurance beacon as it is from Victoria's? Endurance's far rim might have looked something like the artificially degraded image below and we would have been arguing over whether it was near side or far side.
Click to view attachment
Victoria beacon on the left and Endurance beacon on the right as it might have looked from the same distance.

Colors and shapes may match but the absolute headings don't.

Increasing?

I was not refering to just the beacon, I meant the whole swath of features visible between the end of the dune field, and the rim of Victoria.

Doug

I have to agree strongly with Tesheiner here. The basic identification of features has been done on this forum (here's an example by Tesheiner) and it agrees with the "official" jpl identification made here.

The only source of disagreement is the location of the beacon, which jpl and half of this forum place, sadly in error, on the far rim.

Even if others already did, this is my version of Sol848 3-frames average of beacon:
Click to view attachment
This stuff is more and more intriguing Sol after Sol...

How true, Dilo! Although some of your 'Colleagues of the Sponge' have suggested the opposite, it was your compendia of Beacon views over the past months, with their remarkable consistency despite our southerly progress, that convinced me that a far rim location was a logical non-starter. Tesh's trigonometry merely added the scientific "iceing" on the cake. How your own images led you to an opposite conclusion is a question I can't manage to answer.

Perhaps Dilo was paying attention to the (certified) rocket scientists at NASA and JPL who mention something called "outcrop promontory on FAR wall" in their diagrams.

Now I'm not a rocket scientist, so I'm not so sure what that means. Since you are the linguistic acrobat in these parts Shaka, could you help the Sponge-istas like me understand all the various permutations of the phrase "outcrop promontory on FAR wall" which might support the Daffy team?

While Shaka ponders this I thought I might be so bold as to suggest "Final Approach Region" which clearly indicates that JPL shares the correct view that the Beacon is a near side feature.

I'm only influenced by my perception, simply the far rim hypothesis seems (slightly) more plausible.
Anyway, I would like to notice that now the beacon is becoming to be visible also in the NavCam images; here I rescaled the last PanCam view to (processed) Sol850 Left NavCam picture:
Click to view attachment
Yes, is only barely visible, but I'm sure will be more evident in few Sols...

I'm no "rocket scientist" either, Dan'l, but I am an old biologist with a fair bit of experience with how "certified" scientists in all disciplines work, and, above all else, I know that they have "feet of clay"; they are human. They can get it completely wrong and yet smoothly, persuasively, stubbornly continue to argue their erroneous conclusions right into the grave. It happens every day, though, of course, it shouldn't. That's not how scientists are supposed to act. They're supposed to carefully, impartially examine all the evidence, to cautiously draw the appropriate conclusions, and to be always ready to change their conclusions if new evidence requires it. That's the ideal; a few scientists actually live that ideal, but others miss by a mile.

I don't know who at JPL conjured the conclusion: "outcrop promontary on Far wall". I don't know what their 'certification' is, or what evidence they had at hand to reach it. I can make a reasonable guess, however, that they probably didn't have much more than the dedicated enthusiasts at UMSF had. We have a tendency to imagine that the "rocket scientists" have all sorts of miraculous, arcane information they carefully keep away from the "hoi polloi" tp preserve their 'superiority', but I find that rather naive. In the cutthroat competition for funding, for promotion, for public adulation and support, if you've got it, you flaunt it. You don't hide it; you publish it. I can easily imagine 'someone' (not necessarily a certified rocket scientist) at JPL hearing about a bright speck on the horizon, locating it, figuring out the bearing from Oppy, laying a straightedge on the MOC view, seeing it pass across the near rim, where nothing terribly obvious could be seen, and continuing across Victoria to where it bisected a big, white, triangular prominence on the far rim.
Aha! Case closed. Pick up the phone to the PR office and give them the word "It's the far rim." And the rest is history. It was too soon and Oppy too far away then (early April) to do a conclusive parallax check on range. That came later, as did the fact that Beacon did not change significantly in appearance as Oppy moved south. Only then did I support the near rim hypothesis. JPL jumped the gun, and somebody there will suffer a little embarrassment, if they actually remember who it was that jumped.

One thing we academic scientists always try to teach our up-and-coming students: "Avoid appeals to authority!" Just because some certified scientist said it, doesn't mean it's true. Always look at the evidence first. In the real world of science they often forget.

And this is the part that made me join the FarSiders. What are you seeing on the near rim that could be the bright object? I can't pick out anything in the MOC image, whereas the inside of the far rim is full of bright white areas. I am still of the opinion that the far rim is showing through a low area on the near side (to appease the parallax camp). When you look at the navcam images, you realize just how far away and insignificant this little speck is that we have dubbed The Beacon. I propose that much of the "detail" in the pancam images is erroneous. We are looking at the product of errors created by glare, distance, magnification, vertical stretching and resolution limitations.

Brian

If it's a crevice on the near side that's producing the beacon effect, then the crevice IS the beacon and it's still on the near side, even if the "light source" (the exact location of which would change with the angle) is on the opposite rim. No matter how you slice it, this particular slice would be on this side, not that side.

However...

Even though the orbital photos show nothing, I expect to see an object when Oppy gets closer, not a rim crack.

Well put!! And oh so true.
Unfortunately, it's not just amongst scientists is this true; though it is they who should know better.
Critical thinking is something all should practice but few do.

I've always favoured the near rim, as my posts show. If you dig back you will also see I was the person who suggested that we might be seeing the far rim through a gap in the near rim, but even at the time I said it I stated that I didn't believe it, I was just trying to think of alternative explanations.

But now we see the beacon much more clearly. It seems certain that it sticks up over the surrounding material, so the gap theory is no good. And although some folks say that there are no outcrops on the near rim that could be the beacon, actually this is not correct. There are lots of outcrops on the top of the near rim, and one in particular where the lines of sight cross the rim which is a perfectly good candidate for the beacon.

Phil

I agree with Phil that we're not looking through a gap. We have enough resolution now to see that the beacon sticks above the rest of the rim - see Dilo's image above or mine in this post.

Also, these latest images are showing real detail - there's consistency between the three pancam frames on sol 848 and images on previous sols. My image isn't stretched or magnified!

The width of the beacon outcrop we can now see is about 10 metres and it's height is only roughly a metre or so. We shouldn't be imagining a lighthouse here! An outcrop with such low relief wouldn't be very prominent on the orbital imagery - it should look more or less like similarly sized outcrops we've been driving over.

Well well now... I think you're starting to shift your goalposts there...

What of the dark mound which is becoming more evident? Is it part of the beacon, next to the beacon or in front of the beacon? Could it be that the dark mound is on the near rim and the bright beacon(s) are behind it on the far rim?

When the beacon was identified here for the first time I though (like most of us, I guess) it was at the far rim.
But problem I saw was that almost all the data to support its placement there had a big subjective component (its brightness, lack of shadows on orbital images). How many times the images played tricks to us? Remember the *huge* dunes expected on the way to Victoria? And the "smooth" terrain I said we would start to see at/about the current rover's site?
That's the reason I tried a different approach and measured some angles (actually angular separations) to see if the far rim location was consistent with those measurements... and it wasn't. Actually it was consistent with a near rim position. Off course, this method is not absolute; there are still some "unknowns" (at least to me) which raise some concerns, but the *big* difference wrt the far rim "theories" is that it's not based on perception but just on mathematics.

[quote name='Tesheiner' date='Jun 16 2006, 10:05 AM' post='58606']
When the beacon was identified here for the first time I though (like most of us, I guess) it was at the far rim.
but the *big* difference wrt the far rim "theories" is that it's not based on perception but just on mathematics.

I believe that we can se the "exterior" of us on the BBQ party and Beacon is showing the "inside" of us!
All of us come up with a "scientific" theory as well as wild guesses.

I've got another question that I think has not been addressed yet :
Can the Beacon be not as bright as it show? I mean, as we've got lesser light on Mars than on Earth, cameras are adapted to the local light. So, as compared to our terrestrial references, we are measuring contrasts more than actual brigthness. One possibility will be that Beacon show because it's surrounded by black rocks. Any thought about this?

Did I ever say I love this thread? The true spirit of exploration! From the comfort of your own home

[quote name='jvandriel' date='Jun 13 2006, 09:56 PM' post='58249']
Maybe whe see the white cliffs of Dover.
jvandriel

Very unlikely coming from the North

Has anyone calculated odds of if the apron of Victoria is navigable? What if we get to Beagle (CC) but can go no further towards Victoria? That would be a real downer.

I've tried to compare the MOC image texture of the apron to other previously navigated areas...and to be honest, the best match I've found is the area between Eagle and Endurance, and about as far South as Vostok...i.e. utterly beautiful, perfect driving ground. Now it may turn out to be very different, it might be horrific - but personally, I think it could well be a perfect stunning drive straight to the rim post-corner.

Doug

The fact that the apron shows very little in the way of dunes (a little on the outer edges, and then practically nothing as you approach the crater rim) leads me to hope that it is hard, compacted, possibly even baked to a concrete-like texture. Obviously that would be the best possibility. If it's soft, or worse, if there's a hard but very thin and breakable crust above softer material, then it might well be the end of the line.