I think the Beacon's prominence is not a matter of only brightness, but also of altitude above the general rim level, which is not so evidnet in this view. As a fellow (and now humbled) far-rimmer, I put it at the most prominent mini-cape SW of point 2, the second point to the SW. Look also at the ground level views from Oppy regarding altitudes

Kenny

heilige scheisse!!!!!!!!!!

What I'm looking forward to is a true color approximation of the color image

I've played a bit myself to 'get it right' but I prefer to wait for an official release...

Nico

Like the song too : The more I see - it, The more I love - it...

Thanks for everybody, this time the MRO staff, Whoe have the real right stuff. It's astounding. And I was clicking desperatly on MRO site last six monthes, whithout an image since the test ones.
I wasn't expected that anymore. Incredible, really incredible.
I know, no science in my words, only breath.

But the two teams are on the way of eternal souvenir, like Voyager mission. It's a part of history.

Thanks again.


Sacha from Paris (Fr)

I think the Beacon is the point a bit southwest also. One thing to look at is the shadow of Beacon on the floor of Victoria in the this picture.

Sirs, I too had breathing issues in the last hours...

Good catch, Jason!
compared with vertical projection: Click to view attachment
I can see rover tracks before and (barely) after stuck (red arrows).
The white stuff is for sure the deep material moved during Oppy unstuck now spread by wind...
MRO image quality is reaching and even surpassing our wildest dreams!

I'm just glad they didn't publish pictures like these before Oppy's arrival to Victoria. That would certainly have taken some of the "Wow !" out of that experience, we'd all been counting down for, for months.

Hirise's capabilities surpass any dreams I had ! When the brave rovers eventually bite the dust, MRO will be able to feed us poor marsaholics and keep us entertained and amazed for years to come.

Congratulations NASA !

Viking Crater

Voyager Crater

Northern Erebus and monster Dunes. Remember these?

I have just ordered more RAM and a larger monitor...this might help...these images are so big!

Several hours before the MRO image was taken, Opportunity saw some clouds in the rear haz:

http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportu...L8P1301L0M1.JPG
http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportu...L8P1301R0M1.JPG

http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportu...LJP1311L0M1.JPG
http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportu...LJP1311R0M1.JPG

They might well have cleared out by the time of the overflight, but on the off chance they hadn't, has anyone spotted any cloud-like features in the MRO image?

Those clouds are likely high up and far away, out of view of this particular photo strip for MRO.

Hi all!

First post after many many months of avid jawdroppingness and admiration for the contributors here...

Anyone notice the tracks left by the rolling boulder just below the cape in the NW quadrant of Victoria?

Phil

http://space.com/missionlaunches/061006_mr...y_victoria.html

"Opportunity has spent 21 Earth months exploring the Meridiani Planum region of Mars, eventually working its way from its initial Eagle Crater landing site to Victoria"

I hope that is just a typo!!

Edit: Most likely it is...
"Opportunity is now into the 960th Martian day of a mission that was initially planned to span just 90 sols"

I think they got a bit confused about what was said at the press conference SteveS mentioned 21 months as the length of time it took to get from Endurance to Victoria which is about right, I think, as she left endurance around sol 310 or so.

I hope this is an appropriate place to record a thought on seeing what I think we could now call 'Beacon Ridge' in the magnificent HiRISE image. On the nature of the ridge - I wonder if it could be part of the rim of a pre-Victoria crater almost completely destroyed by Victoria. This could provide an independent explanation for why it is higher than it's surroundings and the possible presence of upturned strata, without constraining the Victoria-forming process to produce these outcomes.

I'm late to the party - spent all day yesterday in my waterlogged crawlspace replacing a failed sump pump I'm glad I had such an awesome reward after all that muck-work!

Add the thunk of my jaw hitting the computer desk to the chorus. HiRISE is soooooo sweet

>Anyone notice the tracks left by the rolling boulder...

Yes! Heck, that boulder was bouncing along. And there are several other boulder tracks in that north-northeast quadrant, as well as more boulders. I wonder if it is a preservation issue because of less aeolian deposition in tha area or if there is a difference in the evaporitic silicic strata in that area that makes it more prone to producing boulders?

At any rate, these boulders and tracks will be an excellent indicator of the driveability of the sand when Oppy takes the drive in.

--Bill

I hadn't noticed the boulder tracks, but I had been wondering about the apparent concentration of boulders at the north side of the crater. Seasonal temperature differential, perhaps? Frost/CO2 cracking?

"recent" feature ?


Click to view attachment

in NW of victoria

"interesting" feature ... !


Click to view attachment


no comment ...

in left bottom ( SW of victoria ) ...

At fist look it seems some unusual process has occured, but I think this strange looking feature is just the result of drift patterns around otherwise ordinary craters. interesting to those studying drift formation and wind patterns, I guess.

Maybe those craters are older than the sharper, darker one to the right?

Excuse my repetition of the reactions of others, but the HiRISE images are of course gaspingly stunning...

I for one am looking forward to getting a good view of the heatshield impact from above, and the poorly imaged parachute and back-shell, plus retro burst marks and airbag bounce marks, not to mention the lonely little lander...

Likewise over at Gusev, the curious gouge of Spirit's heatshield embedded in the rim of Bonneville...

a few months ago in a precedent post (here) I have make a comparison between my 3D projection vs MOC view , I can today compare it with HiRISE

Click to view attachment

Could it be that the twinned craters were made at the same time, and then the features jutting out on either side would be the remnants of ejecta being squeezed out from the area between the craters, at the moment of impact?

Hmm. Kind of dark, isn't it? Any possible link to the cobbles?

Seems plausible. Maybe the whole crater cluster represents a 'buckshot' impact from a fragmenting "rubble pile" or ejecta clump (secondary craters).

I hope no-one minds me posting this here... if they do I'll remove it and put it in the Rover-related writing thread. It just seemed appropriate here - and it is a request, after all...

Sleeping

There she is. See her? That tiny black
Speck on the crater’s crumbling edge,
Just above the ledge where the New World
Falls away and tan becomes grey
With berries hissing and pouring into Victoria’s
Dune-rippled heart.

See that dark dot? We made that – Man,
Women and men, thousands of them,
Worker ants in white coats or ties, eyes
Fat from days without sleep, creeping
Home after dawn from their offices, factories and labs,
Whispering “Sorry…” again as they slide into bed;
Another meal or birthday party missed.

See that ink spot on the edge of the abyss?
We made this! Built it by hand in spotlight-bright
Clean rooms; we groomed, evolved apes
Bent metal against its but to our will.
Imagine that… monkey paws
That once chipped flint and ripped
Bloodied skins from spear-skewered prey
Now shape steel into wheels that rove across Mars!
Electronically embroidering silicon
Into miniature medieval tapestries
Of glorious silver and gold, they gently
Turn wrenches, tightening bolts on panels and plates late
Night after late night, weary but thrilled by
The sight of their dreams taking shape
Piece by piece by piece by piece…

No, that’s no fleck on the lens,
That’s a metal Magellan exploring
An ocean of dust, sailing o’er rust-
Coloured cobbles and stones to stand
On the edge of Victoria and, hands shaking,
Roar at the pink sky “Ultreya!!”

One day men, women and children - Mars-born,
With faces pale from lack of sun and limbs lengthened
To long-fingered branches by their world’s
Begrudged gravity - will come to this place to
Stare at Her statue and be amazed,
Imagining the day when brave Opportunity,
Caked with dust and wearied from her trek
From Purgatory and over and through
A thousand deep dunes hauled herself to the edge
Of the Bay and said “Enough… let me rest here,
With the great sky above and gnarled, gargoyle-
Cluttered cliffs on all sides; let me hide
Here, peering down into this stadium of stone.
I am Home… let me sleep… Make me travel no more…”

See that mote on Mars’ sands? There we stand,
Each of us, each martian dreamer,
Fanatic and Fool. Our hearts are Her heart,
Her dust-dried eyes our own.
A mere machine is She no longer – if she ever was –
But a ship, as noble and strong as the creaking,
Slapping-sailed craft after which the great crater was named,
Carrying our hopes in her hold as she boldly goes
Where no ape-built machine has gone before:
To the shores of an amber-hued ocean of dreams.

There she is. See her? That tiny black
Speck on the crater’s crumbling edge.

Sleeping…


© Stuart Atkinson 2006

Bravo. Brilliant Stu.

Beautifully done, Stu.

Now when Oppy finally does reach the end of her travels, you're going to have to get that engraved on a plaque, and go leave the plaque leaning against Oppy's wheels.

Beautiful poem, Stu. However, the "Big Crater or die trying" crowd are going to get on you, too for suggesting this as her final resting place.

Brian

Nice words Stu, very evokative.

A side by side comparison of MOC cPROTO and HIRISE

I resised the MOC image down a bit to try and match the scale of the HIRISE image.

Am I the only one who is amazed at just how much more tangible the HiRISE images are, after all they are only 2-4 times the resolution of MOC. It doesn't seem right to me that they should seem this much more real.

You're not the only one! I'm amazed at how much more 3-dimensional the dunes appear.

Nico

I'm finding myself questioning now just how much of the route we actually see in the HiRISE picture. From that, is it even possible to see Jammerbugt or Purgatory?
Or do the other B&W images cover more area than the color one?
This is based on the high-res HiRISE image, as well as these routemaps.

Here's what I stitched together: A crop of the HiRISE Victoria image (only cropped vertically, the horizontal view remains untouched), with a background image of a MOC traverse route. Purgatory and Jammerbugt, and indeed a considerable portion of the rover's travels, appear to be outside of the view of this HiRISE image.

Click to view attachment

Alright, there we go. Just FYI, the blank white rectangles on the sides were where I cut out some of the MOC imagery to reduce the filesize a bit.

See earlier in the thread for identification in the HiRISE images of: Purgatory identified by Jason. Jammerbugt identified by Sunspot. The colour section only covers the central portion of the HiRISE swath.

So is that it then, that those other features are only visible in the B&W imagery, and not the color? Were they only able to get multispecral coverage over a smaller area?

Yup just the central region.

Ok, gotcha. Great, now I've got to download another huge image file.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that my guess from the early HiRISE images may be right, that is, that much some of the "texture" we were seing with the MOC was really noise. The comparisons suggest that now we're seeing the same areas with much improved S/N ratios.

Steve

Stu... nning.

All of that.

And... "To the shores of an amber-hued ocean of dreams." is great - I mean, Shakespeare great (IMHO).

Just read your poem, Stu...beautiful and evocative...a very moving testimony to MER and its people.

I only hope that its vision is realized at Big Crater or beyond!

Yes, Stu. Those were very moving words.

There was an interesting article in a Tuscon Arizona newspaper recently about the "fine tuning" of the MRO imagery, especially with respect to Victoria. I can't wait for the stereo. The sweetest part is at the end.

Link

Ok, gotcha. Great, now I've got to download another huge image file.

Only some 214 meg for the jpg..... rougtly 25,100 by 35,500 pixels....

Yes - the HiRISE detector is 10 CCD's side by side in the red. The middle two CCD's though are joined by Near IR and Blue/Green CCD's as well, so you get basicaly, 20,000 pixel wide images with the middle 4,000 in pseudo-colour.

Doug

Any tips on what application to use to try and manipulate that beast of a jpg. The Gimp on my system (IBM T43p with 1GB RAM) reads it in _s_l_o_w_l_y_ , thinks about it for quite some time then tanks. Something to just chop it up into 100 2meg chungs would be a good start.

More ram is must to be honest - I'm on 2GB and can just about manage it. Considering XP+Photoshop or GImp is probably taking half a gig....then going from 1GB to 2GB actually trebbles the ammount of memory available for the file within gimp/photoshop etc.

Doug

I wonder how much science we can get from those views of the Rovers & All from above. I'm surprised by how "clean" Oppy looks like. I was expecting she get some colours from the dust and be more "integrated" to the scenary. Here are more questions I ask myself :
1- Oppy landing base didn't probably get some cleaning events (?) how she'll look like since last picture ?
2- Will be interesting to compare Spirit's desk from above to what we see on the ground AND what we see on the sundial. I guess she'll look like quite "red".
3- How "red" will Viking 1 & 2 look like?
4- Same question for Pathfinder

Now, in another thread I bet we'll see Oppy shadow and I was (nearly) right. What can we exactly see from Oppy's shape. To my eyes, there are two "bulges" behind; or, is this the HGA?

I was away last week and I must admit that my vision of Mars changed completely, thanks to MRO. We'll all have a very new vision of Mars in the next months. Lot of discoveries to come guys...