JPL says they are 19 km away, so James is correct.

You can check it by visiting the JPL http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/pre...-B951R1_br2.jpg

Rodolfo

Thanks! We can even see SE rim at 35 km distance, amazing.

And the details are starting to show up...Priceless... :

<Clink> <Clink> <Clink> <Clink> <Clink> <Clink> <Clink> <Clink> <Clink> <Clink> <Clink> <Clink>
We need to open another box!
I'm sure we can deduce height and size from that.
Ustrax, one again, you've picked up something important, and you're very good to match features (except the Beacon )
Thanks

I don't know if anyone else has already spotted this, but I think we can also see the west rim of Big Crater directly beyond Cabo Frio about 15 km away, although it's very subtle. I've labelled the north, south-east and west rim peaks as A, B and C in this montage:

Click to view attachment

Thanks to DEChengst for the pancam mosaic.

Castor

Yes, I've seen it Castor.
I did the same as before with the ones you made reference to.
It is just an attempt, don't know if it is correct (au contraire of what climber says I'm not good at matching features...just ask pando or james...)...But, by now, we got all the time in the world for divinatory arts... :

http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b14/ustrax3/ithaca3.jpg

I didn't plot the latter peaks in the update because I'm still not sure which they are. The are in line with the southwest rim of the 22km crater, but the height of the rim there doesn't seem sufficient for them to be visible from Victoria. The topography map I'm using was generated from the 128ppd gridded data, however, so it is possible that the pixel over that part of the rim is averaged with the surrounding elevations, and reduced accordingly. I did check the individual ground tracks, and there isn't a gap in the coverage there, so the peak's elevation should have been sampled. I didn't check the individual profiles to see if the values differ from the gridded data there, though.

Those peaks "appear" farther than the southeast rim peak, which is 35 kilometers away. The southwest rim peak, tangent to the line of sight from Duck Bay, is between 18 and 26km away. There are two other large crraters past the 22km crater in this direction that *might* have peaks on them tall enough to be seen from Victoria. The first one is 41km (near rim) to 48km (far rim) from Duck Bay, with rim peaks over 120m tall. The second one is 56km - 68km away, and has rim peaks that are higher, but my topomap doesn't cover its southeast rim, so I don't know what the height is.

Based on the Pathfinder experience, where we had a 450m tall streamlined island that was over 30km away and easily visible, and based on the fact that the topography slopes down away from Victoria to the 80m+ lower plains that these craters are on, I think it's possible to see this far even with Mars' curvature. But I think we will just have to wait and see if one of the higher promontories around Victoria will give us a better view of the horizon.

-Tim.

Is this an arrival sol poll thread? My pick is sol 2560.

And with a very long extended mission, I would think that a dropoff in the ability of the battery to fully recharge would kick in, further reducing the power available for drives and science activities. I don't know off the top of my head the what the battery capabilities and projected lifetime are.

Well, According To Steve, we have about 10,000 recharge cycles to play with before we need to worry...

Echoing some of the other discussion - I think we'll be looking around the rim quite awhile before we go in - and I dont think they'll send Oppy down unless they have a good probability of getting out. So they'll find best paths and best targets to get the science they need.

Beyond that.... whew... reach "Big Crater" on day 2500+ I would suspect they will need several intermediate goals to justify funding another 1000-1200 days. But beyond the science, keeping Oppy and Spirit around allows JPL/NASA to train new operators and try out new software for the benefit of future rover missions.

- . -

This mission is starting to take on "Voyager" - like timelines. 2 1/2 years to reach Victoria, a year in Victoria, another 3 years to "Big Crater" Sooner or later Oppy will encounter alien intelligence, gain self-awareness, and come back to haunt mankind like some sorta Star Trek movie plotline

- . -

<clink><clink><clink>...oops. Does the swear jar accept plastic? I have a debt to pay...

Fantastic work, ustrax....talk about a tantalizing long-term goal on the horizon...

If they attempt to get to Ithaca, can you imagine they could send a command once a week for the rest of the week and get results by the week-end? Can you imagine that ???

I've been wondering about that myself, Climber. How much independence could we program into these babies? Is it conceivable to imagine a very long-term mission with a much lower funding level, with Oppy rolling along as best it can on its own towards the "big crater" or wherever, with only occasional input from earth? Some weeks she might make great progress, while others she may wait for days for help from home.

I'm sure the answer depends greatly on the terrain. I couldn't imagine software that could get you safely and reasonably quickly through the worst ripples of the etched terrain. But then I don't do image processing.

Also, perhaps with higher resolution orbital MRO imagery a safe path could be laid out and Oppy simply programmed to follow it, with occasional position checks from Earth to correct for cumulative errors.

5 1/2 years?!?...I'm counting with it for MSL arrival as the limit...
When I'm being optimistic I see it in June, 2008...
Are we following an escargot or Oppy?, the self sustainable rover?!...

nprev...Let's wait for the pros to say something...

climber...That made me laugh out loud on this cyber and people here aren't aware of the "miracle" we're witnessing, neither will they if we arrive to Ithaca...So, let's keep it simple...BY what I've been aware of extended mission funding is coming...

EDITED: Great approach fredk!!!
That's the Spirit leading Opportunity towards Ithaca...
After Troy Ulysses made it on it's own back home...
This is a great Tomorrow's topic! The kind we'll be back in some years from now...

Oh, of course...that was merely unbridled wishful thinking. If Oppy made another 35 km, Lockmart should come back to the government at that point and demand royalties!

Still...it sure would be nice if, on that sad future day when this unbelievable mission ends, those hills at least fill the horizon of the last panorama, showing tantalizing new features while the surrounding landscape gradually transitions into a new geological province...

This thread is more active than the Victoria Crater one. Are people bored with Victoria Crater already?

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence...

I haven't got time to do the maths but from previous work I would bet that your match is wrong. I think we're looking at a much smaller part of the rim. I would guess that the whole feature is between your rightmost two circles.

Tim, thanks for the reply. Now you mention it those do 'look' further. Is there any way of estimating the distance based on how 'hazy' the hills look and the atmospheric Tau?

James

Bored yes, you'd think so wouldn't you? Here's one heck of a crater right in front of us but we just have to reach beyond, already..

I admit I'm fascinated by that big crater too though -it's always a thrill spotting horizon features and having data from orbit to compare..I remember spending a lot of time doing that in Pathfinder days

Nico

It's much like the Gusev Crater Wall imaging from back in the Bonneville->Cahokia days

Doug

Exactly, ahh those were the sols.. This robotic adventure keeps rocking, better than ever I'd say, but I remember well those first months, the excitement, the dreams -that became

Nico

Before deciding to go to Ithaca, I seem that there will be a question:

For the distance of 20 km

1. Drive as fast as possible: average of 50 m/sol, 400 soles
2. Stop as many time as desired for any science activities: average of 20 m/sol, 1,000 soles.

The most probable, the option (2) would be selected. On that way, there are might be some interesting zones to perform Mini-TES, MI, Mousbauer??? (still has some life) and X Spectometer??? (still some life), Navcam, and Pancam. If the arm is got stuck, hope it would be in stowed position, then no IDD and then drive as fast as possible.

The suggestion of Fredk is very good, Try to get the support from MRO team to take a high resolution image on Big Craters zone in order to select the best route in order to maximize the automated navigation.

Now it is still another big dream!!!

Rodolfo

Where will Opportunity go next?

If the rover survives this adventure, another one is around the corner. "There's an even bigger crater to the south, 7 kilometres away," Banerdt says.


http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060925/full/060925-16.html

<wild-speculation-mode on>

The problem with this mixed strategy (drives and science-stops) is the very fact that the remaining
rover life span is limited ... therefore, in order to reach the really big goals we must set very hard priorities: A "big crater" or B "science-stops". While it's even unlikely to get A it's simply impossible to get both.

So if we want to have a chance to reach such a goal at all, the strategy must be
different from the conventional drive-and-stop policy used so far.

The new strategy would be:

1. use every possible drive sol to drive the maximum possible distance.
2. no science stops, not even then if (moderately) new things are encountered on the way
3. only exceptions:
- regular brief stops, say every 20 drive sols or so in order to track and document geological changes along the way
- a very new discovery pops up along the way whose "scientific newness" is so exceptional that the expected scientific value of it's investigation outweighs the *total* expected scientific value of the original
goal

Of course this means deliberately taking the risk to loose a couple of hundred drive-only sols
(that had otherwise been used for routine science stops) in case of a premature failure before reaching
the final goal. But this risk is just the price to be paid for the chance to reach the "big goal".

Actually we had already seen a bit of this chance in drive policies for the part where Oppy crossed the
plaines between Erebus and the Victria Apron.
Who knows if we had ever reached Victoria, had Oppy spent many dozens of Sols of additional
intermedient science stops during that time.

</wild-speculation-mode off>



Yes, in the end it's our dreams and imagination that fuel and drive any exploration and science ...

I'll only be satisfied when Oppy reaches the antipodes of her landing site...

The overriding goal of the mission is science return. The goal for any future block of time is to maximize science return during that block of time. A consideration in committing to a long time block is the probability of the rover being alive at the end of the time block.

In equation form:

Science Return = Potential Science Return/Time taken x Probability of being alive

Probability of being alive is probably proportional to e^-t/k where k is the expected half life of the rover. I think that the two wheel failures and the IDD motor problem indicate k is less than 1000 days. I’d pick k = 500 days.

I think Opportunity will probably spend the current mission extension exploring Victoria because great science is right at hand.

I don't think anyone here expects or wishes for less than a year of exploration at Victoria. Still, it is fun to make plans for a rover still going two years from now.

Maybe more...

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/sfjcody2/crater.jpg

There's nothing even close to VC size 7 km southish from VC on the Themis composite. Just an Endurance-class guy to the southeast. Probably a typo.

There is a crater about that distance away to the west. I hope they choose 'Big Crater' instead though.

http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/01/24/

Hey! That looks very good as a mid-term goal towards Ithaca!
Very very nice!!!

Hey floyd..."probably proportional to e^-t/k"...?! ?! ?!
We're dealing with the improbable here...And the improbable can't be measured...Just executed...

I don't think so... it's in almost the opposite direction!

Bah!...There you go...
A good direction is like Xmas...Is
where a man wants it to be...

On the contrary, I'd prefer to spend no more than 3 months at Victoria, then head east for Big Crater (BC) with minimal stops along the way. If I were driving I would immediately drive down Duck Bay, stopping every few meters for instrumental measurements of the geological section, then skirt the dune field while on a slope which maximizes the sunlight on the solar arrays, taking lot's of color panoramas as we go, then drive up some bay on the opposite side (with perhaps a few more geo stops going up the vertical section), then spend the summer going all-out towards southern BC, and spend next winter on the sun-facing slope of BC's south-rim hills (or at least on the west-rim hills).

Why? The rovers were built in-house at JPL. Lockheed Martin was only responsible for the aeroshell. Even if they were the prime contractor, I'd say LM can get royalties as soon as they reimburse NASA for the Mars Climate Orbiter, Genesis, and HESSI.

Ball Aerospace built the pancam mast, the high gain antenna and gimbal, the power distribution and control modules, the pyro firing circuit modules, and the REU avionics boards (telem for cruise and lander).

BC ought to be a goal since that is the way our primate psyches are wired. But the purpose of the journey has to be science stops along the way since Down Section is the actual Prime Directive.

--Bill

If they ever decide to make a dash for the big crater, it will be with ***FAR*** better routemaps than they have now... with highest possible resolution data from HiRISE and probably 3-D high resolution topography as well.. and CRISM spectrometry of the route, they could plot a route that can likely be navigated much better than the route to Victoria, and pick "5 day" science stops every 2 weeks or some such with more assurance they'll hit the important en-route variations.

You want to spend less than half the time they spent at Endurance, to explore twice, three, four time the exposure of outcrop?? That woudl be selling the place short wouldn't it?

Seriously guys - 'Big Crater' may be a nice pipe dream, and it may be somewhere worth aiming for if we were totally and utterly finished with Victoria....but to cut short investigation of the most extensive and amazing opportunity yet for a goal which realistically we can not expect to reach would be silly imho.

Doug

Maybe I'm not primate? Having spent years crossing an interesting-because-unearthly but nevertheless monotonous plain to get to this wonderful place I have absolutely no desire to set out on another long trek. Let's just stay and get to know Victoria really well. Not just the solid geology but every aspect of the local environment - dawns and sunsets, microclimate and crater wind patterns, dust transport processes, seasonal changes.

Oh, I agree. If the old girl is still able to rove and seems healthy after a thorough Victoria investigation, we might consider extending the traverse. But OTOH, setting Oppy in good locations to watch erosional-depositional processes as a semi-sessile base station would work as well, or better.

As a geologist-primate, my ancestral urge is down-section.

--Bill

I stand corrected, sranderson & ToSeek; was just trying to make a (pretty lousy, really) joke...

And actually, I'm coming around to the idea of staying at Vicky for quite awhile. It looks like there's a lot of stuff to do here, and risking Oppy on a mad dash to a distant goal at her advanced age seems unwise unless and until VC is first thoroughly explored.

On the right tip of the landing ellipse, just outside of it, there are two eroded craters. They both have white features in the middle. Are those dunes or large mounds of eroding outcrop? There was also one North of Endurance Crater, about the same distance north as Victoria is south.

http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/01/24/

I have an idea. Why doesn't NASA use the spare rover at the JPL lab and send it as close to BC as possible. Obviously, it's a proven design and probably could be done very inexpensively. Plus, this should fill the gap nicely until the Mars Lab Rover gets to the planet. MRL shouldn't go to BC, it should go to region on Mars that gets very little sunlight since the RTGs will supply the power and not solar cells.

My recollection (and I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong) is that the rover at the JPL lab is more a prototype than a spare, and not really "complete" in the sense that it could be dropped on Mars and function. On the other hand, at this point it would likely be relatively inexpensive to assemble a genuine duplicate rover, as the design work has already been done. I have had a recurring fantasy of setting-up a little assembly line to mass produce these things and drop them all over Mars. Still, building the rover is only a small part of the cost; it remains terribly expensive to actually deliver it to Mars.

I agree that MRL shouldn't go to BC, there are plenty of unexplored regions with interesting geology.

I realize you weren't particularly serious, but I still didn't want LM to get credit where credit wasn't due, particularly since they have a long history of million-dollar screwups.

Why less than half the time? To begin with, this is all fantasy, the JPL folks aren't gonna do what I recommend, and I know it. At the same time, let's place the exploration of Endurance and Victoria into context. Endurance was the first major exploration target of the mission, so a lot of caution was appropriate. We were still learning about managing rover operations, and didn't know much yet about how the rover would interact with the new environment - slopes and different materials and so on. A lot of learning needed to take place. Subsequently the rover ops have become pretty routine, we have a pretty good idea of how the rover will handle the different terrains and slopes associated with Victoria, and today's navigation software is a lot more robust. In principal, we can do a lot more science in a lot less time (barring Mossbauer (integration, assuming that's the instrument with the decaying radioactive source). The main thing of interest in Victoria is the vertical geological section, which can be surveyed neatly during crater ingress and egress, horizontal exploration won't add much to that. So, we make an initial pass through the geology on ingress, identify portions worth additional exploration, and hit those in depth upon egress. We take lot's of pretty pictures along the way, along with mini-TES. The main limiting factor that I see is how densely to sample the surface during ingress/egress, and considering the depth of the crater I may be underestimating this. In summary, I'm not suggesting that we cut-short the investigation of Victoria, merely that we be expeditious about it, and move on once we've reached a point of diminishing returns. Yes, 3 months is probably ridiculuously optimistic, but I think that 1 year is excessively pessimistic. Perhaps 6-9 months would be about right. What I'd like to avoid is getting into the mind-frame that Victoria is where Opportunity goes to die.

Spirit has demonstrated, albeit out of necessity, that you can spend many, many months in one location gathering information. There is easily enough science work at VC to use up its year of funding commitment.

Should that funding be extended yet again? Is the science to be gained on a post-VC trek worth allocating money that might be better spent on another mission?

Everything I've had access to painted VC as an ultimate goal. Probably an impossible one, but one to consider if it lasted long enough. If there are other targets beyond VC that JPL wanted to get to, let me know. As it stands, I think the best course is to let Opportunity finish up its roving science at VC, then largely pull the plug next autumn. Put Opportunity up high on the rim of Victoria Crater to finish her days making long term observations and measurements. Let the MER team walk away by choice, heads held high that not one goal... no matter how pie in the sky it seemed initially... was left unfulfilled.

Maybe there are better spots from a scientific standpoint, but from a purely emotional perspective, I know where I want Opportunity to come to rest. We saw it from afar, even if we couldn't agree where it was for the longest time, and the romantic in me can see it as Mars' way of saying, "I know it's tough, but keep going little rover, you're almost home".

Let Opportunity find a home at the Beacon... call it Opportunity Point as a fitting tribute to the team of people that gave us this wonderful adventure. Do you really want to wake to the news that motor failure has left the rover stuck in some anonymous ripple out on the plains, half way to nowhere?

Brian