Indeed...
That lead us to another hypothesis that even pleases me more...
Ithaca Crater!
At a same time the home of Ulysses/Odysseus, and an hommage to all the brains coming out from Cornell University in Ithaca (population: 29287)...
We have to remind that Ulysses returned to Ithaca...Will Opportunity make it?...

You'll be glad to know that I heard a rumor how they are out at the JPL test bed right now practicing "rover rolls". The goal is to see exactly how to approach a ledge and roll off of it so that the rover lands upright after three or four tumbles. I hear it's not going well but it's really fun to watch....... (joking, just joking)

I second that. Actually, I was going to propose the same name! I'm shocked. You must have read my thoughts.
One more reason for Ithaca. There are many interesting geological features around, and also many waterfalls, including Taughannock Falls, which is higher than Niagara falls. That fits well with the goals of the MER mission - study the geology and the role of water.

Dream! Dream! Dream!
I'm already answering to myself...
But, as in other occasions provided by this two little wanderers, something magical happens from time to time...
We are reaching Victoria and Oppy will be there for a long time, but somehow some of us feel that she won't end up there. I do. And this poem...Oh man this poem...
Text version

EDITED: Pavel, it would be a great place to end this Odyssey wouldn't it?...

Wow, this thread is zuper nuts! We're talking about 8-10km drive?

This may not be totally unreasonable, especially if the science return is low because the arm craps out during the Victoria campaign. Sadly, if this were the case, there would be fewer reasons to stop n' sniff, and perhaps a more aggressive drive campaign. If the terrain is favorable, we might get up to 80m drives again... placing the West Rim in reach before the onset of next winter, depending on how much time is spent at Victoria.

Then again, I had dreamed of Spirit exploring the Chaos terrain... which is gonna be quite a stretch for her to pull that off.

This really makes me wonder what the MSL mission will be like. That could cover some serious ground!

Personally I've re-read already several times and I got severe cramps on my belly...
From Doug's "For the love of god" to climber's UMSF city..."Mad, mad, mad...I'm loving it"
It's truly a strong candidate for the forum Zuper Nuts Award 2006...And who knows 2007, 2008,...

Um... ...12 kilometers, PAST Victoria, so from the southeast side of Victoria. And that's to the degraded rim (rimless). The north rim peaks are 22 kilometers away, and stick up about 80-100 meters above the local plains. The southeast rim peaks are 35 kilmeters away, and taller (though I don't have my topomap open at the moment).



If the shoulder joint fails while the arm is deployed, it will be impossible to completely stow the arm, so it will be in the field of view of the navcams and bouncing around a bit while driving, so the distances we'll be able to cover will be MUCH less than with the arm stowed.



There is a difference between planning on GETTING all that way versus driving in that direction to cover new ground. I don't think many of us expected we'd make it all the way to Victoria with Oppy, and yet here we are. Spirit may not be able to move far in a sol, but it may be able to move. And who knows how far it may go before something else breaks? Worth a try.

-Tim.

End? Never!
By the time we are there, we'll have another big crater in sight, perhaps the "big splat" further south.
An the software will be updated again allowing Oppy to chase dust devils on its own for the purpose of cleaning

One thing at a time...
12kms?...Do you guys have anything planned for 2009' Autumn?...

Yeah! Launching MSL!

-Tim.

Good answer Newbie-Senior member How can this be ?

Because Doug says so!


Ustrax: Going back to your feature matching. I still think most of the features are fictitious, I really would advise going back to the 'raw' images.

Re B&C, the 'twin peaks', some guys here have been tracking those since way back, I think there is no doubt that it is part of the north rim complex, your 'A' on the Themis image.

I think this topic will be better adressed when we have some L7 which should be much better quality for distant features.

James

Sometimes it just cracks me up seeing "newbie" on Tim Parker's user profile....

Now what are the overall odds of Oppy Getting to The Big Crater called ustrax abyss #3?

I would say 10 % odds that Oppy will get there if they don't fall into Victoria ustrax abyss #2

A good joke, no so very far from reality.

Did any of you rover fans see test footage of the rover dismounting the lander back before they decided ramps were a good idea? It was on the web a long time ago, some NASA site, maybe while the rovers were cruising to Mars, or maybe shortly after landing. I've looked for it since but failed to find it. If anyone knows its whereabouts, please let us know. It's a fun watch.

OK. No ramp. The rover needed to get off the lander platform and onto the ground, a foot or two down. It rolled right to the edge of the platform, kept rolling so the front wheels were in space, kept rolling on 4 wheels, and the entire craft began to rotate -- gasp! -- until the rover body was almost vertical, until the front wheels touched down. Then it rolled some more and the middle wheels left the platform and reached the ground, and finally the rear wheels: 6 wheels on the ground. It was scary -- and it was only a test vehicle.

Yeah. I'm glad they eventually went with the ramps. But, it was good to know what kind of a vertical step a rover could handle if it had to.

Anyone else see it? Know where it is?

I didn't see the footage your talking about, but on a similar theme, is anyone else a little nervous that new driving software is being implemented as the rover approaches the egde of the crater. I would think they might try it while the rover is navigating the plains not on the edge of a cliff. If Oppy falls to her doom into Victoria beacause of the new software, NASA will have wiped out all of the good will this mission has received and face a PR nightmare.

The software, as well as the Earth part of it, has been ready when it has been ready, which is NOW. So ...
Apparently they set goal to have it up & running before upper conjuction. Who knew when they started developping it where the rovers will be by then **
**: I mean, except Tesheiner

I saw the movies, and some where the rover would have landed on its top it the restraints had not been in place.....

I don't think its just driving s/w I think its all the flight s/w, and I am 100 % sure Oppy won't be driving over any cliffs.

Just to put everthing in a wider context, I have assembled a false-color image made up of MOLA(red), THEMIS Day IR (green), and THEMIS Night IR (blue) images, grabbed as context images from the THEMIS site. The Red rectangle outlines a region which includes Victoria (the red cross) as well as everywhere else Oppy has been. The Big Crater is labeled.

Click to view attachment

This illustrates the variety of surface geology in the region. Clearly the Big Crater is the nearest target of any interest, with some unique properties which stand out nicely from the surrounding terrain. Far to the south are some more big craters and some large channel structures (remnant rivers?), but I'm afraid those will remain out of reach.

[edit] I notice that there is a distinct change in terrain about a third of the distance between Vicky and the near edge of Big Crater, which could by itself justify heading in that direction.

The THEMIS site is really quite nice.

Lovely Cavafy poem. Let me throw in Tennyson's _Ulysses_ as well, seems quite apposite:

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/121.html

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone...

I found an MOC image that goes right through the middle of Big Crater (BC):

http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/e07_e12/im...1/E1101328.html

Here's the hi-res version (not map projected). The north edge of the crater is a little above half-way down the image strip (wedge-shaped ridge, with point towards the left), the south edge is a crescent shaped ridge near the bottom of the image.

http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/e07_e12/fu...11/E1101328.jpg

And finally, here's a labeled clip of that same image, clipped to exclude most of the region beyond BC.

Click to view attachment

There's some weird stuff going on in the southern portion of BC. The material is darker than elsewhere. What the heck are those black, channel-like features? I would guess shadows of ridges and fault lines, but I'd like to hear from someone with more geology experience than I have. Further to the south are hints of extensive layering. This place gets more interesting the more I look at it. We may just need to send MSL here if Oppy can't make it.

Thanks for the search algorimancer..been wondering for more images of BC too but I've been to lazy and on the wait for other things to just happen

-the dark channel-like features are most probably basaltic-sand dunes.

Nico

The Dune fan in me thinks they're sandworm tracks.

Those would be mighty big sandworms

Nico

Does anyone know what minerals are being highlighted in these THEMIS images?

Click to view attachment

I've looked all over the THEMIS site and am unable to find any mention of it.

The portion that's darkest is on the slope of the "outcrop" where it drops off about 400 meters from the center of the crater to the south floor. THe dark features are dunes.

-Tim.

I think the trickiest issue for the planners would be coming up with a driving strategy for the etched terrain that is suitably aggressive but can also avoid/correct for getting stuck in drifts.

It would take the rover 400 sols to cover 12km if it moves at an average speed of 30m per sol. Can this be done on the etched terrain? Maybe with a cycle of single sol 90m 'mostly blind' drives followed by two sols allocated to drift extraction (if needed).

This pales in comparison to the much bigger problem facing the members of this forum...

How do you tell when you've arrived at Big Crater so someone can win the inevitable arrival poll?

This issue alone could give the JPL planners second thoughts about attempting such folly.

Brian

Huumm...So what you are saying is that we now have two alternatives for Oppy...
Roving towards the Big Crater or be headed for the MSL landing site and cover it live for us folks back here on good old mother Earth?...

On the excuse that the subtitle of this thread is 'premature speculation' I dare to present a premature routemap for the MER drivers. I went to the MOC gallery and found two narrow angle images adjacent to and east of S0500863, which cover the most part of the area between Victoria and the Big Crater (or Ithaca, as suggested):
http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/e19_r02/im...3/E2301344.html
http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/e01_e06/im...5/E0502642.html

To build this map I stitched the non-map-projected jpegs that are a bit 'flattened' but just therefore quite suitable for this purpose (though I had to hammer Victoria a bit flatter also). Below only the southern part shrunk to 60%, but it's still large (~1 Mb).

I think I found a relatively dune-free path for Oppy, so if she were driving say 200 m every other sol, she could reach 'Ithaca' around the Christmas 2007, after completing studies in Victoria next September.

Stay Tuned for upcoming event's.

Beacon 2 Poll for Big Crater

Details to come

Just at the moment I'm a bit conflicted as to where to target in BC. Climbing to the top of one of the rim hills would yield one heck of a panorama, but considering how long it took Spirit to climb into the Columbia Hills, as well as the wear-and-tear (broken wheel) on the rover, it may be wisest to drive around the hills and target the (lake?) deposits at the southern portion of BC.

marswiggle's mosaic is nice. I'd never looked out in that direction before but I was very interested to see a new type of terrain in the lower right corner. The surface is smooth and dark with numerous clearly defined (but very shallow) craters. The etched terrain had many vaguely circular markings, a lot of which were probably the scars of old eroded craters. But this new area looks different. So I think it would be worth looking at this area - about half way to the big crater - if such an extended mission were to be undertaken. (I'm not actually expecting anything after Victoria).

Phil

In a broader sense, saving the hill climbing for late in the process to preserve rover health and maximize science opportunities, I would envision something like this:

Click to view attachment

This doesn't account for the dune orientation, which would undoubtedly lead to a lot of fine adjustments.

It makes sense. Since the begining of Oppy's journey we're going down and down so, it'll be very important to explore features above what we've seen so far.
But, what I can't believe is that you've got project AFTER big crater. Good on you.

There's some really cool stuff further south, including a couple of more BIG craters, and one or two old riverbeds. Sure it's not likely that we'll get that far, but who knows? Oppy may still be limping along 10 years from now. I think that after Victoria we could get to a point where we just trust the rover's navigation software to do what it's there for and just drive and cope with the terrain as needed - perhaps routine 100-300 meter drives every day or two.

That would be sweet, but I wonder if the large dark region in the center of the big crater is an Ultreya-like dune field that might be pretty much impassable to Oppy. Hard to tell at the resolution of that part of the image.

We should be so lucky that the terrain inside the big crater becomes a problem!

The absolute record, with perfect terrain and a 100% healthy vehicle is 220.

With half the power, one broken steering actuator.... I would aruge that the very most we could dream of is 150m in any one sol.

Doug

If there's no route into Victoria, it would shorten the stay there and boost the chances of something beyond there -- for good or for bad.

Perhaps future rovers should be equiped with anchors, cables, and winches.

...or piggyback a couple of these little guys

I've been biting my lip on this subject as I half-remember seeing a more appropriate forum or topic somewhere else, but as you've brought it up...

A few small (intuitively) simple devices could greatly multiply the abilities of a future rover. In particular, a way to perform in situ sampling/observations on inaccessible slopes. From a geological perspective, the most places with the densest concentration of interesting features are by definition inaccessible to a wheel rover (cliffs in particular.) I'm thinking in particular of that happy day when my great-grandchildren are watching (live, 3D, full-spectrum imagery beamed straight to the visual centres of their brains, no doubt) of the first explorations of Valles Marineris, but there are plenty of less dramatic locations. I've seen variations on the "fly slowly by the cliff-face" idea - tethered balloons and such like - but what we really need is a mechanism to winch the IDD (and a pancam) over and down cliff and outcrop sites, and then reel it back in without it getting snagged and dragging the rover over the edge or getting damaged banging into rocks.

Back to ^r-land

MSL will have a laser to blow rocks and do simple analysis from a distance up to 9 m. This can solve the issue when you're looking up i.e. when you're at the foot of a cliff. When you're looking down, may be a "crane" could be considered to lower down instruments and it could also be used the other way around to anchor a rover descending a slope like the ones we can see here, at Victoria

Actually JPL is already working on this. I attended a lecture up there a couple of months back that demonstrated such capabilities. The presenter was a guy I went to grad school with.

Here's a link: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/lectures/may06.cfm

Maybe we'll learn that the rovers have little rockets, like we learned about R2D2 in movies subsequent to Star Wars Episode IV. What's the special effects budget for these guys?

Notice in todays JPL update they agree that the main peak is on the far (SE) rim of the big crater (35km away)

Also note that some smaller features can be seen in todays pancams.

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...CNP2386R1M1.JPG

I haven't looked at the angles but I would bet that those are the hills on the west side of the crater that SFJCody plotted the route too in the first post of this thread.

James

Any chance you could link a pic of a terrestrial equivalent? While I don't doubt that they are basalt, I've looked around for dunes similar to these, without any luck.

Click to view attachment

The only terrestrial feature that I've found (so far) that resembles these features is eskers or collapsed lava tubes. Any chance they could be eskers? They don't look much like collapsed lava tubes.

I found a LPSC2006 reference to eskers on Mars - apparently they're not unknown:
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2006/pdf/2035.pdf

Another reference I stumbled upon while googling "sinuous ridge" was to trapdoor faulting in a volcanic caldera. This seems also not out of the question as an explanation. Could really use some more hires pics.

I don't get it... On which rim of Big Crater are New Twin Peaks exactly? How far are they?

The twin peaks are on the north rim of the big crater, roughly 18 to 20km away I would say.

James