and another Panoramic view. This time from Sol 1106.

Taken with the L2 Pancam.

jvandriel

Now that's a cool view
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Enjoy
Astro0

That's like the very first really good view of the cliffs around St. Mary. Incredible!

I'm amazed at the difference of each part of Victoria. North is very different than the South. The West is very different than the East. And now it turns out that the Western part of Victoria is also very different from the both the Northern and Southern parts.

I hope the rover can either round these capes to the next one or egress so that we can enter again from a different location. I'd like to see Oppy do it 4 or 5 times, at least.

That's a cool view indeed - those St Mary cliffs really are incredible. Only one slight problem, Astro - left and right channels are switched!

A series of pancams from sol 1104 are down - these are unusual in that they are L4, L5, L6 ("red, green, blue") - is this the "postcard" we heard was planned?

Exactly.

01104::p2381::10::36::0::0::36::2::74::pancam_good_hope_postcard_L456

BEAUTIFUL landscape...!!!

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Wow.... any rock climbers in the house..?

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I know there's a lot of optimism out there, but this does look a bit, um, steep...

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Long baseline views of the capes to the west from sols 1106 and 08 now in. This one shows the tip of Cabo Corrientes and a nice 3D look at CSM/beacon and Duck Bay behind:
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The next view shows Corrientes, and behind that Cape Desire, and behind that Cabo Anonimo, and finally CSM:
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Warning: 3D effect is pretty extreme over this range of distances!

Very spectacular indeed ! Lovely with the evening shadows and your beautiful color balance

Nirgal

Just browsing quickly through the latest Oppy pics ...
its so good to see all you guys keeping up the great image work !

Looking forward to the coming crater-descent-phase with many new perscpective views

Here is the L4 Panoramic view

taken on Sol 1104.

jvandriel

and another view from Sol 1108.

Taken with the L2 Pancam.

jvandriel

It's Sol 1121, and no new images have been put on the MER raw images site since 1116. Is this Spring Break at Cornell and/or CalTech? Or is something wrong with Opportunity?

Everything is OK with Opportunity...
New images are here

"New images" are timestamped from a week ago. Do the 'codebreakers' have a sense of what's going on at Victoria?

the exploratorium site doesnt seem very useful for finding what SOL an image is from, since the timestamps seems to be based on the mod date of the directory or file itself, for instance the latest image date i could find there seems to be from the 2007-03-20 directory which would seem to be a new image.

..however when i punch in the filestamp into the lyle site it brings up old images from SOL 1106

so wha happen?
well, perhaps it is a new image to us, in that its a backlog from an old sol that hadnt yet been downlinked, but at least that would show oppy is still sending pictures, just not any new ones yet.. so were still in the daark

Opportunity is sending images that were taken on past sol's. But what's going on at VC? Does anyone have any insite into why we're not moving or taking images?

ed

Other than routine science and engineer activities, the last time oppy did anything was drive on sol 1114. There must be something unusual going on.

ed

According to the MER Status update as of March 20th (that would be today):

1114 - Stalled Drive
1115 - No drive
1116 - SSW drive to Cape St Vincent
1117 - No drive

All seems fine for Oppy.

Spirit had a missed day last week due to an MRO safing.

Images from sol 1121 are down. Oppy drove closer to the rim
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...K7P1312R0M1.JPG

Nothing has changed my opinion that this is a very dangerous bay to attempt ingress. In fact, the second lip's drop seems even steeper than I thought earlier. The one place that I thought might be possible because of the satellite images appears just as steep as the rest of the second lip. If they attempt, I haven't a clue as to how they will do it.

Whoa! Happy feet! Dance floor

Regarding the (lack of) activities on last sols it's curious to find that absolutely NO sequences can be found on the PCDT for sols 1118 up to and including 1120. Perhaps that was due to some diagnosis and/or giving the chance to downlink the data stored on flash memory.
The plan for sol 1122 doesn't include anything more than a few tau measurements but the one for sol 1123 has some sequences related to driving.

PS: I won't be updating the route map this week, because I'm off the town.
Greetings from Germany.

It's very hard to judge the steepness from rover imagery at a single location. Even the 3D MRO imagery only gives some average slope and couldn't resolve short steep drops. Before they know if this is a viable entry point (or more importantly exit point) they have to do long baseline 3D imaging with the rover, which is in the plans according to the latest update.

I don't believe we are even looking down the chute, yet. There will be better views coming shortly...

ed

Oppy was in a science standdown due to a fault. All is well now.

Well, that was what I was wondering -- especially since I had seen this post from helvick and was truly mystified with his conclusion:



A sequence of sols that started with a stalled drive means "all seems fine"? I was thinking that the stalled drive might well have prompted some troubleshooting, of which the sol 1116 drive was a part.

For the most part, I've noticed that science obs tend to get put on hold while they're troubleshooting engineering issues. That's what I thought was happening; nice to see I was right...

-the other Doug

While we all suffer from withdrawal, we do have a few crumbs to work with, and really they're more like nuggets or jewels than crumbs. Here's sol 1121 pancam looking across the Mouth of Peril:
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And looking "down the chute" into the "abyss":
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I spy a Hoylette in your second image, FredK. I wonder how often they fall off?

AndyG

I spy it too. Yet, it is not just an Hoylette; in fact, it may be more Hoy than "Hoy"--if that's possible. Look at the base underneath; it's practically nonexistent. It's seems to be hanging on almost complete thin air; not just a precariously situated column of rock!

...as far as the question of how often they fall. Not very often.

The rock field below is covered and mixed with fine dust. The primary process that eroded Victoria must have long since slowed to an exceptional crawl, if mass wasting is even still happening at all. I would not want Oppy directly below this feature, just in case it is. If by any chance Oppy could disrupt the base enough by its tracks, then there quickly could be no more rover. But I wonder how much of danger that really would be; perhaps virtually nonexistent.

The following link leads to a page with a flash animation that shows several types of landslide:

http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072...nd_movies.html#

The last one seems more applicable here; but, I don't see any water below.

New images are down!

It looks like Oppy is now at the beach.

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...LOP2390R2M1.JPG

It looks like Oppy is imaging the dark streak from a distance before rolling over to get a personal look.

Here is the panoramic view from Sol 1121.

Taken with the R2 Pancam.

jvandriel

Wow, that's quite some overhang - that layer must be particularly strong structurally as well as erosion-resistant. I'm wondering if it's the same thing we saw on Cape Desire.

Wow, vertiginous views ahoy! Great anaglyphs, thanks fredk

In the absence of occasional seismic shaking caused by impacts or anything else, I would imagine a lot of the hoylet(te)s and other precariously balanced rocks would spend a long time in the zone where a relatively small but close jolt could shake a few loose, whilst being very very slowly eroded by windblown dust and sand.

Long baseline imagery is in for Cape St. Vincent, looking across the Valley Without Peril on sols 1121 and 1123. Here's the tip, including the "hoylette": (I like the white layer in this view)
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And the adjoining view, which includes "Lump #2":
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Opportunity looking at the dark streak

on Sol 1123.

Taken with the L2 Pancam.

jvandriel

Somebody needs to do a silly-stupid graphic of Oppy with Bathing-Shorts on, before she "takes the plunge".

Simple Question:

Why has Oppy's travels become slow??? She was moving quite fast but now she's hardly moving at all. Can someone explain why?

Thanks

Some stalls, some lost uplinks - it's all in the updates on the JPL site.

Doug

Those are "old" news.

There was a 30m drive some hours ago placing the rover on the way to Cape St. Vincent (latest map update, here).

This is a gamma-corrected navcam taken from the current site and looking SW back to Duck Bay. We might be near/at a point where Oppy's arrival point @ VC could be visible. Check these two posts here and here.
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If this picture was taken at then end of the recent drive, the first dark streak doesn't look very dark close up. I can't convince myself that I even see it.

Victoria Crater on Sol 1126.

Taken with the L0 Navcam.

jvandriel

It hardly knocks your eye out, but the surface does seem darker right around here than it did farther west. Streak #1 surface
Without some MIs of the surface it's going to be hard to tell whether the berries are just more numerous, or have a darker, dirtier (or cleaner) surface.
Above a certain threshold density (and at appropriate sun angles), the spaces between concretions should be mostly in shadows from the berries, so the surface looks dark.

yeah, 'shadow-hiding' (becomes a major problem when mountain biking at night over technical terrain and using a headlamp, but i digress)... it looks as if there was some sort of semi-closeup study done on SOL 1124 but i cant find SOL 1124 location on Tesheiner's map so hopefully its in the right place for this question and will have captured some useful info, although no MIs have yet been uplinked. im wondering if the MER team has already figured out our question long ago as something not worth mentioning and isnt bothering to look. but no fear the next cape over has an even darker streak than this one..

Personally, i never could make sense of the dust-removal hypothesis for the formation of these dark streaks, to me it seems like dark dust that is picked up from the turbulence inside VC from eroding the cliff walls and is deposited in this pattern outside the crater as the air slows down and the darker dust falls out of it. but then again, i was a devout 'far-sider' so my track record isnt spotless..

Right, the sol 1124 pans are the best we have so far, but they're just not close enough for me to discern whether the berries are shiny (Clean Streaker) or dusty (Dirty Streaker). If there is a coating of dark dust over this area, then we are going to have to identify the material, and its source down in the crater. As of now, I certainly haven't done that, and so I still lean toward the cleaning wind-plume hypothesis. Maybe the next good panorama of Bay without Peril will show something, but I'm not holding my breath.

Same as for sol 1123. Oppy was stopped at that place from sols 1123 (p.m.) up to 1126 (a.m.).

BTW, tosol (1127) was driving day too. The images should be down soon.

Here are the images (http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportu...cam/2007-03-27/) but the rover's position has barely changed.
There was a "turn in place" to place Oppy at the proper heading but followed by less then one meter drive (check this rhaz image: http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportu...00P1312L0M1.JPG).

I would call it an aborted drive.

Sol 1129 (tonight @ Europe) is planned as another driving day.
The imaging plan includes a 7 shot navcam mosaic tilted down at 30º. IMO they would only do that IF attempting to drive right to the rim to take a shot of the slope.

01129::p1964::navcam_7x1_az162_elminus30_3_bpp
01129::p1965::navcam_3x1_az_342_1_bpp

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