Autostitch actually freaked out on me several times before I got it to work properly. I've noticed that the program sometimes seems to get "confused" after making a number of runs tweaking the parameters. The worst run resulted in a tangled mess of distorted frames, many of which were in the wrong place. I have learned to shut it down and restart it when that happens. It often behaves nicely after that.

This is a great picture. I'll bet some of you artists could make some good color pics from it.

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...ZTP2563R1M1.JPG

The last Rover update, in which they speak about the Beagle Highway, reminded me of a few song lines from the last Johny Cash album, "American recordings V, A Hundred Highways".

The song goes like this:

I have been a rover
I have walked alone
Hiked a hundred highways
Never found a home
Still in all I'm happy
The reason is you see
Once in a while
Mars' been good to me

I bet he is actually singing about Opportunity's recent cleaning events!
Amazing, isn't it?

It's not just the block rocks that get my rock blood going, but the close mix between the blockier rocks and what looks to be the fairly smooth rocks next to them. And by smooth I mean nearly flat to the dust around them.

While it's apparently a difference in friability, what makes that difference? Do the "blocky" rocks represent a lens or a layer of evaporite with a higher fraction of different minerals, say, volcanic ashfall/dust?

As for the "smooth" rocks, why do they seem to be eroded slightly smoother in the crater than they do just outside?

Forgive me for crossing disciplines into the realm of you geologists, but it appears to me that the surface of Beagle is covered with more and more dust as you move inwards - the dust fills the gaps and results in a smooth inner surface.

Truly! Aldo, you should use this song for you next HazCam movie!

I am genuinely puzzled by the smooth "paving stone" character of the bowl of Beagle. I expected to see a cross-section of layered evaporites, but we rocks that look jumbled together. I might suppose that we are seeing an ejecta breccia from Victoria, but that view has problems. It looks more like it is draped over the bowl of Beagle, and we haven't seen large areas of jumbled breccia next to Beagle, the surface looks more neatly layered and fractured, as usual for the etched plains.

And there are the blocky, dark-toned areas on the rim. The one noted by gregp and WindyT seem to be associated with a smaller crater next to Beagle at 9:00, the other area is on the rim at 1:00. I don't quite know what to make of these areas, the rocks are laminated, darker and look blocky. We need a closer look.

--Bill

Yes I was thinking the same of this image ... and did the following attempt of (false) coloring
the scene ... hope you don't kind the bit over-saturated "oil painting style"

The mystery men have obliged yet again to help provide scale, though they were afraid of mucking about in the sand at the very bottom:
Click to view attachment
Thanks to jvandriel for the beautiful background pan - navcam sol 898.

Oh yeah, and a happy belated 900 sol aniversary to you Oppy!

If there had been standing water after the impact that created the crater ,and that water had a frozen cap, any material deposited on top of the ice might give a drapped appearence after the water went away.

This is not my original thought, I saw it somewhere, can't remember where.

If you recall, we did not see the draped-over, paving stone phenomenon in Eagle, but we did in parts of Endurance. If the hypothesis proposed in the Edgett paper is correct, the draped-over stuff is the result of a layer of sediment put down after the crater's formation, and which was partially eroded while the remainder slumped down after being undercut by erosion of the underlying older layers. That model seemed to fit well with the idea of Endurance being an older, exhumed crater, and Eagle being fairly recent in origin.

For some reason, Beagle looks very recent to me. It's probably the abundance of ejecta rubble and rays nearby that lead me to that conclusion. That makes me wonder why we are seeing something hypothesized to be a feature of older, exhumed craters in an apparently recent crater. To me, Beagle appears more like Endurance, but it may have had a more complicated story, if it was formed on a surface previously covered by Victoria ejecta.


On a lighter note, has anyone wondered about the unusual names given to recent targets? For those who didn't recognize them, or haven't googled them as I did, they are the names of species of finches endemic to the Galapagos region, and discovered and described by Charles Darwin while on his adventure of discovery aboard the HMS Beagle. At the moment they seem to be some very fitting names as we approach what appears to be the culmination of this epic mission of discovery. Sitting here looking at the current view of the crater, the horizon, and the finches in MMB, I can't help but feel very proud of OUR species.

Tom, as we approached Beagle I figured that we would find answers to many questions once we got to this roadcut. But things are more complex than we imagined and we'll leave this site with more puzzle pieces which will eventually help us to understand the history of this region.

Mars is indeed a mystery wrapped up in an enigma.

--Bill

Take a peek, new Pancams posted at Exploratorium today. There is a series across that small younger crater just west of Beagle and several close-in of the Beagle ejecta.

And a few L7 Pancam images of rocks...

--Bill

The must have transmitted pictures of everything EXCEPT Beagle Crater LOL

Attached is a Pancam of a very unusual rock in today's images. Although the rock itself is a bit puzzling, it's origin is not, because, after all, the swallow may fly south with the sun or the house martin or the plover may seek warmer climes in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land? I think that I may spot a strand of creeper on the rock...

--Bill

Ah, but with the thinner Martian air, an otherwise unladen Martian swallow would have to have enormous wings to achieve the airspeed velocity necessary to carry such a rock by its husk.

That is an unusual rock!

Ha! Johnny's one of favourites, so I might just do that! I've fallen behind on the Hazcam videos, which is just as well: Now that Indian 3000 has his version of the antivignetting program, it'll give me a chance to try it out on the Hazcam images. Stay tuned boys & girls

Great Aldo!
Cannot wait for the next movie...

Update today from New Scientist.

Curious comment that after the visit to Beagle,
It'll be interesting to see where we've driven to today. I expected a longer stay at Beagle.

Also,

Great update. The Tracking Database confirms a drive today:



Hmmm, "Beagle Ripple." You don't suppose they are actually driving into the thing? I wouldn't put it past them

Edit: On second thought, perhaps more likely they are checking out the tiny mini-ripple area and imaging the larger ripple nearby. Still, you never know...

My impression is that Beagle, Endurance, and several of the other smaller old craters which have had that characteristic draped-over phenomenon show evidence of plastic deformation from the forces of the impact event that created them. In my thinking, the impact blasts out some ejecta, destroys the impactor, and creates a significant local "quake". Under the tremendous force of the impact, the surface for several meters around the blast region undergoes a wavelike ripple (probably with an amplitude of a couple of meters) which extends in a radius of several meters to 10's of meters from the blast region. What we then observe is the after effect of this wave of plastic deformation. (Such surface waves are not unknown in vigorous earthquakes if the rock structures amplify the waves in a certsain manner right near the fault. I just think that they could happen very locally in an impact event also.)

Been away for a little while due to a move and glad to see things are right where I left them beforehand....

Except Oppy of course, which seems to have moved in the last 2 weeks.

Rough stitch from Sol901 PanCam imagery (R2):

Fred said:


I wonder what the sources of their article were? An interview with Arvidson, or other printed comments?
I suppose that the feature where "sand and dust seems to be caked together, perhaps as a result of small amounts of water" refers to a duricrust, which is a reasonable assumption and seems to be ubiquitous on Mars. I doubt that they are talking about a substantial thickness of "indurated" sand.

Here in a crop from a Sol 891 PanCam; it shows what appears to be an Anatolia feature on the other side of Beagle. Maybe we'll get a closer look.

--Bill

When looking at those big flat sections of evaporite over on the far side, for example:

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...ZTP2291L2M1.JPG

I wonder about the 3D context of those slabs. Thin slab lying on the surface? Thick block planed smooth at the surface? It would would be nice if the MSL carries some sort of seismic "pinger" which could be pushed up against the occasional rock to answer questions like this. Conceivably had the MER rovers carried a microphone they might have been able to improvise something similar by bumping the rock with the arm and listening for echoes. I wonder whether the rovers' inertial navigation system might be sensitive enough to pick-up these sorts of echoes?

When I look at Beagle's rim, I think that Mother Nature was wearing her MCEscher hat at the time...

--Bill

Good one Hadn't thought of that

Wasnt today supposed to be a drive day? What happened?

Sol 903 was supposed to be a drive day. We are now well into Sol 904 and still no pictures. As another Victoria might have said, we are not amused.

And now, the obligatory speculation based not on a single shred of evidence that Oppy took a wrong turn and fell into the crater.



Brian

Does anyone have one or more ultra-high res colored images they'd be willing to send me for public display? My department has a new display wall and they're looking for visually interesting images to load it with for when it's not churning through 3D protein structures.

(Of course, we have to be careful: with some of these images we might risk losing the best undergrads to the engineering, geology and astronomy departments!)

Images would be properly credited, of course. In fact, your name would probably be about 3 in. tall on this thing. Let me know by PM, and I'll get you a photo of your image on a 10' x 12' monitor. (Or if you live near NYC I'll get you in to see it in person.)

Hello. I hope I'm posting this in the correct place.

I've been a long-time lurker on this group and enjoy reading, learning, and speculating.

I was so pleased with my Photoshop results this evening that I wanted to share with the forum.
So please find attached my "Colorization of Corner Crater".

I created a color layer (blend mode color) using a sample from a Spirit photo @ Gusev.
A little gradient-----and Voila.

Nice pic machine - and welcome aboard!

The data tracking site shows nothing has come down for 2 days

6 Thumbs and 2 subframes from 902, nothing on 903 ( the drive sol ) and nothing so far for 904 ( looks like untargetted remote obs )

I'll give it a few hours till 'plenty' past the time when one would expect the 904 PM Odyssey pass to have come down - which will be getting-into-work-time at Cornell, and drop Jim an email to ask if there's somethign going on.

I don't think it's an Odyssey safing event ( no troubleshooting or de-safing uplinks in the Odyssey log, and Spirit still producing images ). I don't think it's a data pipeline issue on the ground ( again, Spirit stuff coming through ) - so perhaps they had some uplink trouble with Oppy and she safed or something or other...who knows....hopefully we'll find out later!

Doug

EEEEK... that doesnt leave many possibilites except something really bad happeneing lol

If I remember correctly, Oppy has experienced unexpected safe mode / re-booting events in the past
... so let's hope that it is only a software issue like that (possibly related to the recent software upgrade ?)
and not something more serious ...

*hoping*

Nirgal

The software upgrade is supposed to happen in August. When in August? If they want to do it before starting the drive to Victoria, now would be the time.

There wouldn't have been schedules of driving and untargetted remote obs if they were rebooting into new software...I think.

Doug

The tracking site shows science activities have been planned for the days data is missing... would they have planned and transmitted that if something were wrong? Maybe theres just a glitch in getting oppy data onto the web etc...maybe

Sunspot, when exactly was the planning done ? Don't they nornally plan one sol in advance sometimes ?

No need to worry yet: Still there are quite a few "benign" possibilities (sporadic Oppy reboot, like happened in the past etc. ...)

What time does the overnight Odyssey pass usually occur?

Well - usually between about 3 and 5pm local....but it's usually 20-2100 local by the time it gets onto the web and MMB picks up the new files. I've sent an email out to JB - but he's out the office....so if anyone reading this knows what's up.....spread the word

Doug

We've quite often been privvy to a bt of inside info here... such as spirits broken wheel etc. If something really bad had happened, i'd have thought we might have started hearing things by now???? Maybe lol

Maybe i'm being over concerned, but so close to Victoria argggh lol

This unexpected silence kind of has the feel of one of those Odyssey glitches we had last year.

I'd agree with you.....if we didn't have Spirit data coming down the pipe just fine

Doug

I'm an admitted newbie when it comes to working with the Pancam Data Tracking Web Interface, but does this "unexpected sequence" on sol 904 have some bearing why we don't seem to be getting any new data?

I'm not a rover expert but I'd say that this would point to a software problem and fortunately
software problems can in principle be solved by software ... (if necessary by re-boot into safe-mode, re-installation of flight software "operating system" etc. ...)

The important thing is a working hardware and communication channel between
Mars and Earth ... anything else can in principle be solved by JPL's brainpower

As far as I know an unexpected sequence is not an indication of an anomaly but quite normal. It runs if the planned (science) sequences are finished and there is still time to do some stuff (low priority observations etc.) Unexpected sequences are normal.

Analyst

Weird, these images were just posted at exploratorium:

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...cam/2006-08-10/

And they were taken on SOL 904!

So Oppy is still with us