Bingo! Shouldn't Oppy receive a nickname such as "the mole"?

Well, that wasn't too hard. Here's a view from when she was still stuck (it seems like just yestersol):

> I wonder if they can add a check after the turns when they know they could be on soft ground and need to turn anyway ?

Or make the turns and the first step after it *with* Visodom activated. Good idea.

PS: Doug, quite often I get those "Network Error (tcp_error)" when replying with quotes included. Strange...

My "gut feeling" is the problem was a combination of driving by these E-W ripples on the trough AND the turn in place. I think those ripples have less consistency then the N-S bigger ones and the turning manouver was just the kick needed to start digging in.
I first thought: "Let's drive again straight by this trough but with slip checking (visodom) activated". But you can see some additional E-W ripples on the way... what happens if the rover starts again digging in on the second ripple and stops automatically? Another extraction manouver BUT in this case it would be in between two ripples so the rover would be trapped.

Is it just the lighting angle or do the latest rear hazcam pics show that Opportunity churned up some bright salty deposits similar to those that Spirit has encountered?:

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...HUP1302L0M1.JPG

This might explain why Opportunity struggled, just as Spirit did (although with different wheel problems).

You can even see the bright deposits reflected on the underside of the solar arrays at the top of the picture.

Castor

I don't think it's just the viewing angle, Castor, it's so bright. However, it does look very different pre-extraction in mhoward's pic a few posts above, suggesting the deeper churn during extraction brought that stuff up to the surface

http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=161686225&size=l

Kenny

Just messing around a bit... here are some large-size (roughly 3000x2200 pixels) perspective views from pre-escape times. I have no idea if these are of any use to anyone but they're kind of cool:

Click to view attachment
I am trying to figure out about what the tracks which Oppy was stuck and how it was pulled back. Correct me if I am wrong.

1) Yellow line: First track, Oppy stopped before reaching to crest without any trouble.
2) Blue line : Oppy moved back a little.
3) Black line : Third track, Oppy turned to right hand and tried to overcome the crest of ripple with a 24 meters programmed drive (??). There Oppy was stucked on flufly small crest of ripple.
4) White line: Oppy was able to move back and out of purgatory.

Rodolfo



I agree too. The route from Purgatory 2 to Corner Crater there are wave of parallel dunes runing from about South East to North West (prevalent wind comes from South East). So Oppy can go in a stright line to Corner Crater but be careful by no going into a steepy crest since it goes very slow (3.5-5 cms/sec). So if the rovers want to drive fast and safer, try to go among the crests. Some crest can be driven over after studying well about its slope and sand consistency.

Rodolfo

I don't think it's a coincidence. Oppy is definitely going to Corner Crater.

You still have this idea that Oppy moved backwards on the day she got stuck Rodolfo...
Your blue line does not correspond to any move that Oppy made.

Your yellow line is the first movement, correct. The next movement was the turn-in-place. Oppy's leading wheels moved right (you can see this track) and her rear wheels moved left on your picture. Although the turn was executed, it seems to have started the dig-in process. After that it was just more wheel-embedding as she tried to move forward to the crest of the cross-drift.

Right! Joffan I realized it. Oppy didn't move back but just trying to turn to right. It was a crazy turn right movement. The backward track has confused me with ones of right turn.

Rodolfo

The surface looked quite firm and passable until Oppy made the turn-in-place and then she sunk into the powdery material. It is almost as though there is a surface crust, much like fresh snow, that can support weight until you break through it to the fluffy-er snow underneath.

Odd place, these etched plains.

--Bill

No spare time; the imaging campaing starts on sol 842.



Note: This first navcam sequence centered at 306º gives a hint about the future path. The second seems to be centered at "the mess".

[quote name='Tesheiner' date='Jun 6 2006, 10:10 PM' post='57297']
[code]842 p0775.03 10 0 0 10 0 20 navcam_5x1_az_306_3_bpp
842 p1692.09 4 0 0 4 0 8 navcam_2x1_az_162_loco

Who's called "Loco" ? Oppy's drivers or the place she stucked in ?

Opportunity churned up some bright salty deposits similar to those that Spirit has encountered?:

I also notice the apparent white sol underneath stucked on the front weels when they started to move back.

LOCO means either LOw COmpression or LOssless COmpression, I'm almost sure it's the former.

I was looking for a picture of the track that the leading right wheel made when Oppy made her turn-in-place on WE3 sol. It's very hard to see on the post-escape hazcam images. I was hoping there would be some navcams in the right direction but not yet. Anyhow I found an image in the deep shadow of the rear hazcam picture just prior to escape:

Click to view attachment

It looks like this wheel at least, unlike say the trailing left wheel, still had good traction at this point.

[quote name='Tesheiner' date='Jun 6 2006, 10:23 PM' post='57305']
LOCO means either LOw COmpression or LOssless COmpression, I'm almost sure it's the former.

Oh oh oh, I'm sorry, I realy thought what I wrote. Thanks for the correction
Well, while we're at "loco-something", let sing again the appropriate song :

Now that you can do it
Let's make a chain now
(C'mon baby do the loco-motion)
Chug-a chug-a motion like a railway train now
(C'mon baby do the loco-motion)
Do it nice and easy now don't lose control
A little bit of rhythm and a lot of soul
So come on, come on,
Do the loco-motion with me
You gotta swing your hips now
Come on, come on,
Do the loco-motion with me
Yeah

And now they got a name for this dune.

newscientistspace article:
http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/d...amentation.html


And at the end:

Do the loco-motion with me
Yeah

Yeah, Yeah, You kids wouldn't even know it, if Kylie Minogue hadn't found it in her mother's record collection!
I was around to see it climb the charts when Little Eva sang it!

OT, but, what the hell, this topic's about to shutdown anyway. Permanently, we hope.

[quote name='Shaka' date='Jun 6 2006, 11:13 PM' post='57318']
Little Eva

"Little EVA" may be for the ISS
Oppy's got a Giant Ride in front of her again

Edit : quote corrected

Well, let me be the first Dane here to say "woohoo", great name!

The bight is on the north-west coast of Jutland, and yes, it is well-known for ship-wrecks. The local fishermen used to go in rowing boats out to the ships when they grounded in storms, attach wires to their masts and transport the poor shipwrecked people to shore on the wires. Well, those are the heroic tales. Less selflessly, it seems that some of the inhabitants lighted fires on the coast during storms, to lure in ships so they could ransack the goods that washed ashore!

We had a reform of the local administrations in Denmark, so from 2007 four smaller municipalities will merge into "Jammerbugt Kommune", I'm sure they will be honoured to know a place on Mars is named after their new entity. Here's an overview map showing where the new kommune is placed, and you can see where Jammerbugten actually is:
http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jammerbugt_Kommune

Here's a detailed map of the kommune (pdf):
http://www.jammerbugt.dk/nethotel-include/...&BilagId=305536

By the way: we often write Jammerbugten in danish. The -en just means "the".

My gut feeling is that you are correct.

And well, guys, you better practise your Danish (I'll help you out):

"The rover team will continue to use Danish names for any new features it discovers in the next several weeks, in honour of the country's contributions to the mission. Several Danes work on the rover and Danish institutions provided instruments to study magnetic minerals in the Red Planet's soil, rocks and atmospheric dust. Denmark also celebrated its Constitution Day on Monday."

Let's see if Oersted will come up...

I think we can expect Oersted, Bohr and Tycho at least, when it comes to people. Or will they go for something more obscure? - Interesting!

One person they will certainly honour is Jens Martin Knudsen, who, until his death last year worked closely with the Mars Rover project. He was and is the grand old man of Danish space sciences. An expert in the study of magnetic properties of soils, he had experiments on both the Sojourner and the Mars rovers. He became famous in Denmark because of his tireless and enthusiastic popularization of Space, fermenting the interest in very many people through tv, radio and books.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Martin_Knudsen

I'll drink to that! Skoel! (or however the hell you spell it)
gulp...what is this stuff...fermented interest?

....it's green

It looks like the drivers made a perfect move. Oppy got out, and then stopped right in the middle of the small island of outcrop. I know they made some adjustments to the programming to help ensure that the rover would not overshoot the mark when backing out, but the team again did all the right things.

Let's hear a big round of applause for the Team that put Opportunity back on the road again.

HooooooooRrrAAAAAHHH!

Hey, Doug, I thought you promised our firewall would block out all Star Trek images?
What happened?



joke

Yaaaay. this calls for celebration.

here is a dancing banana to congradulate the MER team and to remind you that it is in fact, peanut butter/jelly time.

This one's for you Bob !
Remember: Time Flies like the wind - but Fruit Flies like bananas!

It was the result of driving backwards.

jvandriel

First navcam pic of P-III (aka Jammerbugt).

Click to view attachment

Thankfully our forum admin havnt thought of blocking Russian scifi as well, then my sig wouldnt work.

And yes hurray btw, for once in a lifetime I was right in not being pessimistic, theres always a first.

The image that Tesheiner posted shows that Opportunity was just a few centimeters from crossing that lateral ripple. We can only guess at whether Opportunity would have got more or less stuck had the rear wheels crossed that ripple.

The bright soil shows up well in the left hand track in this view, as it did in yestersol's hazcam pics.

Castor

> The bright soil shows up well in the left hand track in this view, as it did in yestersol's hazcam pics.

Tosol activities included pancams of Jammerbugt in *all* filters; let's see how they look in color.

Good to be back free again from "Bay of Lamentation" and be able to walk again! and forget of lamentations

As Squyres says: Southward ho!

Rodolfo

Yes indeed. More interesting is to speculate what would have happened had Oppy not made the turn-in-place that she did. The tracks at that point looked like she had fairly good traction and the bulk of the climb toward the crast of the main dune crest was done. I think she would have gone straight over and could have made the outcrop visible beyond.

Although the hindsight speculation is interesting, perhaps the more relevant thought is whether this will change the process that is used to turn the rover - perhaps using more of a "wheeling" action rather than the sharp turn used here. The other turning effect I can't work out is in the approach to Jammerbugt, where the trailing wheels were being "scrubbed" back and forth. I wonder if this is due to some self-levelling algorithm that Opportnuity is using? (ie. turn away from slopes autonomously)

And perhaps if we're very lucky those pancam views will include portions of Victoria, which is currently behind Jammerbugt for Oppy. I can't wait for our first colour view of Victoria, complete with gleaming beacon on the near rim!

I'm eager to see a color pan of VC too. IIRC there is NO image other then in the L2R2 filter for the time being.
Unfortunately, I feel this won't be the case because, given the narrow fov, the camera will be pointing downwards and the horizon will be outside the image.

[quote name='Tesheiner' date='Jun 7 2006, 06:05 PM' post='57413']
Tosol activities included pancams of Jammerbugt in *all* filters; let's see how they look in color.

Only two rovers and already the first Traffic-Jam (merbugt) on Mars

Shaka:

What is a Kylie Minogue? Is it like Kyle of Lochalsh, home of the ceilidh?

Bob Shaw

A look at "Jammerbugt" after todays sidestep drive

... and a mosaic on the "main" thread.

Just catching up on my forum backlog and didn't see a reply for this. It's the latter - from the 31-Jan-06 Jim Bell QnA:

...it means that the image is LOsslessly COmpressed. L-O-C-O. It's our lossless compressor, there has been no compression of the images, so there shouldn't be artifacts, there shouldn't be loss of information.

Exiled as you are, Bob, to the freezing wastes of the Far North, where pop dancing would divert too many precious kilojoules from useful shivering, this is an understandable question. However your warmer conspecifics in the south of the island bear a heavy burden of guilt for creation of this particular specimen of "pop-princess" . Pandora's Box is an overused metaphor, but the free-and-easy attitude of the English public toward Australian television personalities often smacks of foolhardyness.
(If I were a spiteful person, I would make reference now to Dame Edna.)
Consider this a wrist slap.

[quote name='Shaka' date='Jun 8 2006, 08:52 PM' post='57617']
Exiled as you are, Bob, to the freezing wastes of the Far North RIM, where pop dancing would divert too many precious kilojoules from useful shivering, this is an understandable question. However your warmer conspecifics in the south of the island bear a heavy burden of guilt for creation of this particular specimen of pop-princess. Pandora's Box is an overused metaphor, but the free-and-easy attitude of the English public toward Australian television personalities often smacks of foolhardyness.
(If I were a spiteful person, I would make reference now to Dame Edna.)
Consider this a wrist slap.

Jus a little correction, Shaka

I guess the Danish names will be only for other features besides craters, this will remain being named after vessels as we see that corner crater has become Beagle Crater...

I didn't think the navigation team for Pillinger was that far off, and that it would make such a big crater.

Beagle Crater is not the same as Beagle's crater.

Maybe I'm being paranoid but I don't like what I see on the right.
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...24P1311R0M1.JPG

These cowboys are making me nervous. They're practically riding up the back of the beast!

Well, at least the front wheels seem to be sitting solidly above.

http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportu...24P1211R0M1.JPG

Now, as long as they don't try a turn in place in an effort to get a better view of the far rim beacon...

Brian