**** ******* **** !

One word: CAREFUL!!!

It certainly would have filled up once they realized their rover couldn't make it through the dune field and all they would ever be able to do is some remote sensing from one spot.

clinkclinkclinkclinkclink...

Brian

Two reactions to this:
1) this goes back to that "What did you expect?" thread. I think I'd have thought at the time, "wow, one out of two can rove, and the other can give us great pictures in the few days before they both conk out".
2) Suppose it had turned out like that. With 900 days of power (although I guess power is an issue with the crater walls), do we think the rover could eventually have got out from the middle of this dune field and, if so, how?

Ni.

and

Ecky, Ecky, Ecky, Ecky, P'tang, Zoo Boing!

--Bill

to (variantly) quote another famous explorer of cold new worlds:

"Great god , this is an awsome place !"

"Great Scott!!!"

!

Cliff Richard?

No, Christopher Lloyd as Dr. Emmett Brown from Back to the Future

Mysterious smoke!

I didn't think I really had any appropriate words, but another member reminded me today of a story from "Roving Mars" that gave me the words I needed. In case that sounds strange to some of you, it is actually part of a slight mistranslation of something Steve Squyres said after the first Opportunity images came in.

...from page 294 footnote:
(After successfully receiving images from mars rover Opportunity)

“Holy smokes. I’m sorry, I’m just, I’m blown away by this.” I can’t get anything out of my mouth that makes any sense.

"What I didn’t realize was that the TV cameras were rolling and that my comments, such as they were, were going out live to the world. They showed up later in some strange ways. A few days after the landing, the following short piece ran in the Korea Herald, an English language newspaper in Seoul:"

“The day after the Mars rover, Opportunity, landed on the red planet and sent the first batch of photographs last week, the country’s major afternoon daily, the Munhwa Ilbo, translated articles from the New York Times and other American press reports and published them. In the reports, A NASA expert, Dr. Steven W. Squyres, looking at an amazing picture just transmitted from Mars, was quoted as exclaiming: “Holy smoke…I’m just blown away by this.’

“Thereupon, the Munhwa Ilbo ran the headline: ‘The second Mars rover lands, sees mysterious smoke’…It was fortunate for the Munhwa Ilbo that Dr. Squyres didn’t shout: ‘Holy cow.’”

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific - and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise -
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

It's taken 952 strokes at the Meridiani Golf Course, to finally reach hole 2, with a couple of sandtraps along the way. There the analogy ends. The putting must be gentle from now on. We don't want it to drop in the hole just yet

Worth Every Penny.

good one !

Mars rover Speedway

... and a small solo circuit

More seriously and without the need for the now seriously overflowing swear box....

Arriving at Victoria was like a reflection of the launch, cruise and EDL phase of the mission.

Launches are always risky - things can go wrong and you don't get off the pad at all....and that was true at Endurance. It was exciting, but there was always a risk that we wouldn't even start the journey to the south.

Cruise - navigation, navigation, navigation. How much we enjoyed the routemaps produced here - they kept us sane, and out of trouble for more than a year. Occasionally, as with a realy cruise to mars, there were moments of terror. Purgatory being the most obvious - but there were others. A hundred MI images the same, all missing the target and out of focus...would the arm work once more or would Opportunity be forever attempting to hail a cab.

And now landing...we're coming up on atmospheric interface. We know the next step is dangerous. It might go wrong and we end up with nothing. But - the engineers can simulate things on the ground to give it out best shot. Victoria is now very very big in the window - and the door ever appears open. We just have to walk in, and hope we can make sense of what it offers us.

However - the analogy breaks down when you consider this. Every step of the way from Eagle, to Endurance, Erebus and beyond - we have actually BEEN there. The eyes of the rover have become our own eyes. Wheeltracks have been our footprints. We've lived, breathed, gasped, chewed nails and prayed our way through the best and the worst that Meridiani has had to offer, and while we can't sit there and guide the rover - in our minds we've weaved through the ripples and stepped over crests and craters to get to where we our now - this crater - this cathedral to geology. It's flying butresses of outcropped rock, the slopes offering a stairway to the interior.

I don't know if we'll make it into and out of Victoria crater. I think we will, but who knows what suprises Meridiani will spring upon us in the future. To paraphrase someone we all know - it has, in the very literal sense, been the adventure of a lifetime. But not just for the scientists and engineers - also for the followers, the enthusiasts, purveyors of pans, assemblers of anaglyphs, makers of maps, and those who make a science out of speculation.

We sit at the top of the bay, with the historic waves of Meridiani metaphorically lapping at our feet, and our well worn wheels, and I can only think of two things.

Thankyou for giving us the images, taking us on this journey, sharing this adventure.

And may the slip be slim, the arm stalls be sparse, the dust be gone, the rat bite sharp, and god speed little one, through the cold, the wind and the slopes - alone though you are - we are all with you, always.

Victoria in one word or sentence - impossible. There are not the words to use, or one phrase to describe all that has been done to get that rover to where it is now. I'm not a religious person - but when I see images like these I fell the need to thank someone that I am alive to see this and to share it with others.

Doug

Well said, Doug. MER combined with the power of the Internet (and a deep bow to Doug for creating UMSF!) has added a whole new dimension to remote exploration..."virtual presence" for thousands if not millions of people on another world is an intellectual and philosophical gift beyond price, aside from the stunning scientific results that Oppy alone has provided.

I can only imagine how MSL will be received in this light. Already with MER, it really is almost like Columbus was sending back detailed daily updates throughout every step of his voyages...will MSL feel like Apollo coverage?

Don't you mean hole 3.

Doug man!
You say you are not a religious person but you wrote the words a true pilgrim could have written.
The ones who shout "Ultreya", at the end of the journey, facing the Finis Terrae, arrive to the same conclusion as you have: pIlgrimage is a rediscovery of Life's course, and Opportunity (and we along with her) have experienced that feeling, we have lived beyond Earth boundaries.
Thank you, truly, for your words.

Doug,

<clink> for what you've written.
I wish all of us, UMSF'ers, would be together now to share this moment of happyness and congratulate each other for the arrival. What a journey!

doug,

I agree completely with you,
and a big thank for the creation of UMSF.com,

I also think that without UMSF, this adventure (which is not finished), would not have been the same one

once again, big thank you for all time that you devote UMSF has.
( without forgetting all the people who work on UMSF )

Xav.

Very poetic Doug, great words.

"adventure of a lifetime": It truly had been, and still is. I don't believe there will be anything like MER again, MSL will be great but I don't expect it to be the same. Not only have the rovers pioneered the exploration of Mars in a way never seem before, but as they have done so we have constantly pioneered new ways to follow them on there journey. I often look back at old threads in this forum and am always amazed at how things have changed. The creativity and ingenuity of people here has been just mind blowing at times. I feel totally privileged to have been part of it, it's been as much of a journey for me as it has for our two intrepid friends on Mars.

Long may it continue...


James

When Oppy spent weeks inside Eagle, I was impatient to get out of Eagle and take a look at the plains beyond.

When Oppy spent months inside Endurance, I was fascinated by the tale the layers told -- but I still wanted to see what kinds of vistas awaited us out on the plains.

When Oppy set sail for Victoria, I was dubious -- it was a *long* way to go. But I figured we'd get a good look at the etched terrain, if nothing else. And we'd see what the plains had to offer us.

Now we're at Victoria, it hardly seems that the voyage was even possible.

So, for my latest take on this thread, let me steal a line from Al Shepard:

"It's been a long way, but we're here."

-the other Doug

Heh. I'd like to jest, "Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt" – except I haven't bought the T-shirt, and I'm wondering where I can get one. Whatever happened to the UMSF store?

I culled the items because on the whole, they were a little disapointing. I'm going to be doing new ones in time for Christmas.

Doug

Well put! Now that Oppy is at Victoria, I'm wondering "where next" when I gaze past the vision of current wonders...

--Bill

Its easy to use superlatives at a time like this, but I actually do think of this as a milestone in space exploration.

Victoria are everything I had hoped for, even though I was pessimistic we would see this, these images coming down make me cheer for everyone who do follow this exploration. I can see layers of ancient martian history in that vertical cliff, we got a record of ancient planet history to study here.

And I can only echo whats been said by you djellison, Indian3000 and others. Yet I do so since I am happy to have been able to share the experience with you space enthusiasts, advanced amateurs and professionals alike. ..big words today, but thats what I feel.

Very nice words, Doug.


I would also like to thank the scientists and engineers who dreamed, designed, and constructed those amazing machines. This is truly an incredible achievement for mankind to build and send those robots to a distant world, navigate them through 30-degree slopes and endless sea of rocks and dune fields despite the insurmountable limitation of the speed of light. It has been a great journey for all of us, not unlike what the brave souls from Viking and Columbus days experienced when setting their sails to seek out the unknown beyond the horizon. This time, the distances involved here are truly astounding, but every journey has made our world and our solar system a little smaller for all of us.

Those little eyes on top of the mast are the eyes for all mankind, trying to reach beyond the shackles of gravity of our home planet and the nothingness and harshness of space, trying to figure out our purpose and place in this universe. Those little eyes will still stare at that distant world for many hundreds of millions of years to come, when all of our dreams and aspirations on Earth are reduced to a few fragments in bedrock, savaged thru eons of geologic time. Those little eyes may still be there, staring at the lonely blue dot in the sky when it is finally vaporized by the expanding sun, which had earlier given life for all we hold dear. Those little eyes may still be there, motionless, looking at that sun. Think about it...

After Victoria. Oppy is off to discover if Pando is the true Mr. Bean???

Desolate.

That's not my word, but my Dad's, when I showed him the picture below, which is my desktop image right now (slight vertical stretch to fit the screen but it comes out okay).

It made me see Victoria in a new way, not as an amateur geologist or planetologist or explorer, but as a lone human might, coming upon such a scene amidst an endless plain of icy cold sand and rock, feel a chill of awe and lonelyness.

My own response to Victoria is more like what is rumored (according to The Onion - an always reliable source) to be Neil Armstrong's actual first words as he got ready to step onto the Moon:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/26247

Houston: You're clear for T1, walking on the moon.

Tranquility: We copy. Walking on the moon, Jesus. Over
....
Houston: Everything okay, Tranquility?

Tranquility: Am descending the ladder. Can see the Earth. The entire planet Earth, for the love of Christ.

Houston: You're clear Tranquility. Proceed....

Tranquility: Can see the Lunar Module footpads depressed into the surface of the moon. The f**king surface of the god****ed moon. (Long pause.) Holy s**t.

Houston: We read you. Over.

Tranquility: ...Surface is powdery. One more step and I'm...F**k. (Long pause.) I'm hyperventilating. Hold on.

Houston: Steady. Over. (Long pause.)

Tranquility: I'm on the bottom rung of the ladder. Just one more step and I'm...(Long pause.)

Houston: Tranquility?

Tranquility: Holy (pause) living (long pause) f**k. (Long pause.) F**k!.....Are you f**king believing this? Over.....

Click to view attachment

A million thanks to Steve Squyres et al for bringing the MER mission to us direct and live and to Doug for providing the ideal forum for those interested to gather. This whole adventure is right up there with the manned moon landings for me.

Thanks, Centsworth_II. That's part of what I was trying to say above

In all seriousness, this exploration, the incredible engineering and operational success of the mission, the spirit of openness and collaboration exhibited by NASA around the science returns, and amplified by so many including quite notably the denizens of this site -- all of these things exemplify to me the very best our nation has to offer to the world.

(I'm resisting the temptation to editorialize here on some other subjects entirely, but that is for a different message board.)

Cheers to all.

Well, since these posts have stretched beyond "one word or sentence", here are a few sentences of my thoughts on our arrival at Victoria.

It must have been almost 2 years ago that I first met Vicky, though I didn't know her by that name then. I was looking at an MOC strip. In this image (4.5MB) you could see the landing site, heatshield, etc, and Endurance, roughly 1/3 down from the top.

I started scrolling down from Endurance. Down through almost featureless plains, ghost craters, down, down, down. Into the etched terrain that was completely mysterious at the time. Down, down, down. Finally, after scrolling what had to be an utterly impossibly-long-to-drive distance of several kilometres south, at the bottom of the strip there appeared a huge, jagged-toothed monster of a crater.

I fantasized about Oppy actually driving there.

Not much later, I heard Steve Squyres's announcement that Victoria was to be the long-term goal. I'm not sure if I believed we could make it or not, but I knew it would be one heck of a journey. Thanks to everyone who planned, built, and actually drove Oppy all this way, and to everyone here for sharing the ride.

As a child, I was so caught up in the moon landings that I built a 4'x4'x5' cardboard "capsule" over the toilet in the spare bath, stocked it with canned food, bottled water, and a small TV. I spent the entire Apollo 11 mission in that cardboard capsule from pre-launch to post-splashdown hatch opening.

This is the first time that I have become as caught up in a mission as I was back then. The fantastically engineered longevity of the MERs, the openness of the MER team, and the high quality discussion in this forum are all to blame. A perfect storm!

Does someone knock on the door of the spare bathroom once in a while to make sure you're OK?

Sorry couldn't resist. Don't worry I'm as much of a space cadet as you are!

Funny, that's the last word that comes to mind for me, but then again I've been in love with Mars for a long, long time.

When Oppy reached this vantage point I finally, after all these many years of loving this planet, felt like I was SEEING it as it really as. I felt like I was "home" in a way, because as dramatic as the views from the top of Husband Hill were, and as amazing as the landscapes glimpsed from on high by Viking, MGS and Odyssey have been, none of them have ever, truly shown me "my" Mars, the Mars that I see when I say the word, silently in my mind or aloud. My Mars is far from "desolate". It's an epic, Nature-carved world of immense crumbling gorges, shaped by landslides that slip and spill for miles, rushing across valley floors in tsunamis of rocks and dust and bouncing boulders that make the land tremble with their fury; it's a world of nation-sized volcanoes, long dead now, but in their day living creatures that gushed flame and smoke, the open maws of buried martian dragons that thundered and howled at the sky aeons before Mankind first lifted his knuckles off the ground; it's a world that used to bathe in golden sunlight beaming from a kingfisher-wing blue sky speckled with white clouds, from which rain fell in graceful slow motion to patter onto the surfaces of rivers, streams lakes and perhaps even an ocean; it's a world where Life began and fought bravely to survive against biological and areological armageddon - where Life may yet stubbornly survive, beneath or even inside the rocks we see on our computer screens every day.

So I don't see "desolation", tho I accept why many do. To me, "desolation" suggests ruin and destruction, something spolied, something wrecked... What I see, looking down into and across Victoria, is an almost pure sculpture, raw Nature, a planet of almost heart-stopping beauty, grandeur and wonder that's waiting for us to go and experience it in person. Every rock here has a story to tell, every outcrop and ledge and buttress is a chapter in Mars' Book of History, just waiting for us to read them.

One day, after following the "Opportunity Trail" marked out by Mars Heritage, people will make the long pilgrimage south, following Oppy's long-gone tracks from Eagle to Endurance and then south to Victoria, maybe led by guides giving running commentaries, or maybe just walking alone, following their own imaginations. Either way, when they stand here, at this very spot, and look down into the rippled heart of Victoria, shaking their heads in wonder, they'll not see a desolate place. They'll see the true, splintered beauty of Mars, the Mars I've seen in my mind for more than three decades now.

I envy them, of course.

But I saw it first, with all of you here, thanks to Steve Squyres, Jim Bell, Doug and all the image mages at UMSF, and for that I'm very grateful.

One of my all time heroines is Ann Clayborne from Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. The trilogy ends with her thoughts, and until I saw this view I've always thought the last line was a bit of an anti-climax. But now, it seems to sum up perfectly how I felt when I saw that view over the edge of Victoria:

"...and she walked over the sand towards her friends, in the wind, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars."

We're on Mars, my friends.

Imagine that.

Well...I wasn't even a human being back then...But I remember, whaen I was a child, selecting all the articles coming out in the press about Mars...
I am a Mars lover...
Jupiter...great! Neptune...great! Venus...great!
But I am a Mars child...
I remember building Lego spacecrafts with entire voyage plans, and making them left their three stage rockets back to a scenary design in A4 sheets painted in black with stars shining upon...
Now we face those places...
Religious...Non religious...
We're witnessing History.
And,somehow, I know we'll be there.

Ok 3 then. Eagle was a hole in one

...and from that, we can deduce that EDL for Opportunity was a par 3.

That would be a 533.28-billion-yard Par 3....

-the other Doug

Well, they did use an oversized driver...

I finally joined just so I could respond to this, although I could never hope to improve on Doug's words. I've come to this forum almost every day since about Spirit Sol 40. I wish to add my appreciation for the efforts of all who have contributed to this grand adventure. I was the kid who sat glued to the TV during the Apollo moonwalks and still to this day re-listens to the audio cassette tapes I made of the network coverage at that time. The saga of Spirit and Oppy (greatly enhanced by all the imaging experts on this forum) has provided me with perhaps the greatest source of excitement, anticipation and awe I have known in many years, and to vicariously partake of this experience with other people who truly "get it", is a real gift. So to all who have contributed, a heartfelt thank you!

Tim

Welcome, Tim! What took you so long to say hi?

Yep, this just gets better and better, doesn't it?

I guess I usually prefer to leave the bandwidth to those who can offer something more constructive than "wow, look at THAT!!!! " at every new gorgeous picture

And BTW Stu, I hold you responsible for an awkward moment with my wife, as I attempted to hide the tears in my eyes as I read my printout of "The Spirit Lingers" in bed one night...

Well, I guess I'm guilty of the "wow, look at that!!!" thing, but I just can't help it. These images are so amazing, and I feel it's part of the "Community Spirit" of UMSF to just join in and gush over people's work now and again. I know I get a little chuff on when someone takes the time to comment on one of my images, so I like to try and return the favour.

As for the poem, well, what can I say... that would be a heck of a topic for a Jerry Springer or Jeremy Kyle show, wouldn't it? "I Read A Mars Poem In Bed And Now My Wife Thinks I'm Hiding Something!!!!"

Seriously, if you like that one - and thanks! - check out the rest of the poems on the 'Verse site, link provided below.

Gosh! Wow! Boy-oh-Boy!