Well, we have 3, count em, 3 pictures of Opportunity from HiRISE, and they've made little movie out of them. See this link below:

http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/images/PSP/opportunity.html

Also very notable is:

While some of the cliffs around the crater are in fact vertical, the slopes below the cliffs are no steeper than 30 degrees.

Found from

http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/images/PSP/victoria.html

I think you all know what that means;-)

I think that has been pretty clear from not long after Oppy arrived, several of us have been analyzing the slopes, MRO isn't the only spacecraft looking at this crater.



No not really.

30 degrees is pretty steep if the surface is loose. Luckily it looks like there are places where the slope is a lot less than 30 so we'll see, should be OK imho. I think the critical issue is going to be finding assessable outcrops, going up to the base of these cliffs is likely to be steep and slippery with many areas ruled out due to shade and inclination requirements.

Anybody know what the reason was for taking another image of the Opportunity site. I don't see how that much would be gained from it.

James

Well - technically they now have 3 'pairs' (image 1 and 2, 2 and 3 and 1 and 3) - so it means a better DEM I suppose.


Oh - and 'because they can'

Doug

Sure better DEM, but with all the Opportunity images as well the crater is going to be well modeled anyway, it doesn't seem to me like it would be much of an improvement.



Of course, but they *can* also point the camera at lots of other bits of Mars - there is a lot of planet down there! I'd love to have seen another big chunk of Meridiani than the same bit *again*.

Perhaps it was the first chance to do some coord. obs with Opportunity - but with DEM making, I would have thought more is better, and a really good DEM might give us results that let the team make major rover planning decisions that might save weeks or months of rover ops.

Doug