Just thought I'd start a new thread dedicated to crater - to - heatshield fun

We SHOULD see Oppy out of it's hole in the next 12 hours or so!

doug

Waiting...

A watched file listing never updates Andy anyway - your ctrl and r button will wear out

Doug

We are out of Endurance !!!
Way to go !!!

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...00P1201R0M1.JPG

And we are out!

Wohoo!

OUT!!!

Ohh - such sweet, flat, WONDEROUS driving terratory



I wonder how the power situation will change there. On the southern inside of the crater near Burns cliff - it was north tilted and got good power - on the easter edge - it got western tilt and now, on the outside of the western edge - it gets western tilt. Would be interesting to see how many WHr's it's getting now

Doug

Champagne is in order !!! I'm dancing on my chair
A big big thank you to everybody at Nasa for giving us such moments of joy !!

Going on the image time- it would appear that Oppy was re-born at 18:25 GMT today.

That's 322 days and 12 hrs since it's very first image - which was taken on Sol 1 at 14:47 local. It is now Sol 315 - Opportunity has outlived its design life by 225 sols, or 350%

Pando - I dont know if a special rush was put on getting those to the Exploratorium pages - but if it was ( or even if it wasnt ) can you give your 'contact' a very big thankyou on behalf of all of us!

Doug

And still plenty of juice in the old girl yet!

yayyyyyyyyyyyy Great News

p.s. you ought to download an extension for the FireFox browser called "ReloadEvery" it will automatically reload a page at a user specified interval. Not sure if the link below will work, but posting it anyway

https://update.mozilla.org/extensions/morei...id=115&vid=1131

These Rovers must be one of the most successful missions and one with most bang for the buck

Now Oppy is go for the heatshield and then she can really strecth her legs on the way to the etched terrain and hopefully Victoria Crater

Can't wait to see that thing

.......I bet they could reach the heatshield in a single days drive if they really wanted to

Here is the beeline to the heatshield:

Oppy could be there tomorrow, but I guess they are going to do the panorama first.
They might even move half a metre back to get a better view for the panorama.

Is this panorama intened to provide a record of Oppy's journey in the crater?

edit: LOTS of NavCam images coming down, a complete 360 by the look of it. Is this the pan they were planning to do or was that going to be with the panoramic camera?

.... some pancam subframes of the heatshield in, are we seeing features on the distant horizon here?



One of the better images, with slightly less pixel bleeding:

I don't think so — or they would turn up on the other frames. I think it's just haze / out-of-focus horizon.

I was kind of looking forward to looking back down and seeing the tracks of where Opportunity travelled inside the crater. But apparently the perspective is not good from the current location. Do you suppose they might move her to a different location on the rim before doing the panorama?

I think that is pretty much the same horizon in all the subframes. It is just less distinct in the L3 (red) than it is in the L5 (green) filter. The distant surface is more reflective in the L3 than it is in the L5, too.

Looks to me like they've done it - a full NAVcam panorama. Not Pancam. No point in another 3 sols of UHF being lost to the third colour panorama of Endurence crater.

And yes - I see no reason why one wavelength wouldnt spot the etched terrain off in the distance and bring it out very brightly - it shows up - like most rock in the area - very bright in the UV.


Might we be seing that feature even from this distance?


1m/pixel of the next few sols driving.

Those distant features were well spotted. I guess the atmosphere around meridiani has cleared during the last 5-6 months. Oppy had a very limited visibility inside the crater :-).

I think a partial pancam panorama would be useful at this moment. They did one when leaving the Eagle crater to record the adventures there. Also they are probably now in the highest position around the plains that they will be in some time. It would be worth it to do a panorama at least around the horizon to see if anything else has come up through the haze.

Well - when comms conditions are not great - shifting >200Mbits of data just for pretty pictures isnt too good an idea

I'm sure a full pancam panorama will follow when we get to the heatshield - and if there's anything to be seen on the horizon ( which they're probably wont ) - it'll be seen from there as clearly as it would have been from a couple of metres higher on the rim of Endurance. We can see from the pancam pics taken yesterday that looking toward the Heatshield - there's nothing you can see in the distance really.

Doug

It is too bad they don't take a full resolution pan in one color, and then bin two more colors 2x2 or even 4x4...sort of Galileo style color. Or even a red-blue pan with synthetic green. This would give us a high resolution pan to study, as well as color data on a broad scale.

They use adjustable compression of images in the rovers. By using sufficiently high compression, they can get the same size reduction as with binning. For example some of the navcam images from friday (I think) were very compressed. Pancam images are quite often compressed quite a lot. Image scaling to half-size has been also used, but mostly for hazcams and navcams.

Yes, but combined with binning they could make the images even smaller. They could still be used to produce a rough color view to overlay over full resolution images.

They did that a LOT early on - infact, for both rovers the mission success pan from the lander base was done with L2 at full res and L5 and L6 2x2 binned

Doug

How far away is the heatshield?

I wonder why they cut back. It would seem that it would be a good way to expand basic color coverage.

Why the need for a pan? My word, they did tons of panning prior to heading down into the crater. Doubt much has changed. Anyway, great news it got out successfully. Time to go for a record a day on distance traveled.

Perhaps for "Before and After" coverage showing the wheel tracks in the crater. At the very least it would be a good publicity stunt.

A publicity stunt that would take probably 3 or 4 days of remote obs, and a week or two of UHF comms to send back

The tracks are very difficult to see anyway in Endurance - so they'd be wasting their time pretty much.

I'd rather they forego that and start making some progress. We do, after all, have two full colour panoramas of the crater from the rim already.

We're done with Endurance - time to leave it behind.

Doug

True, and I think they would need to be on the opposite side of Endurance to get a good view of the tracks anyway.

Don't forget, they will be receiving data from Cassini too. Hte rovers will have to wait their turn transmitting.

I thought the plan was to do imaging on sol 316 only and to drive on sol 317? If this is still true, it probably will be a partial pan.

Anyway, here is a picture back from the good old days in Eagle crater. It gives a good impression of the distance between Endurance and the heat shield:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/pre...-B041R1_br2.jpg

It's hard to believe Oppy really was there close to Burn's Cliff:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...00P1635R0M1.JPG

Even with the horizon straightened those slopes look insane.

The Titan B flyby data playback started 1 hour ago, mignight GMT, 4PM PST 13 th Dec and lasts for 9 hours, so I guess we are going to have to wait a while to see what Oppy has been doing today.

From today's, JPL press release :
Mars Rovers Spot Water-Clue Mineral, Frost, Clouds

"A portion of Mars' water vapor is moving from the north pole toward the south pole during the current northern-summer and southern-winter period. The transient increase in atmospheric water at Meridiani, just south of the equator, plus low temperatures near the surface, contribute to appearance of the clouds and frost, Wolff said. Frost shows up some mornings on the rover itself. The possibility that it has a clumping effect on the accumulated dust on solar panels is under consideration as a factor in unexpected boosts of electric output from the panels."

Now, would not the red quote be better presented with an image ??

It would

I will now proceed to enter my foot in my mouth
I just saw them myself ... awesome !!!

When I looked at that image i thought I was just seing a negative image of the one on the right, but the mast is actually white with frost, heres the text that accompanied the image:

Frost can form on surfaces if enough water is present and the temperature is sufficiently low. On each of NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers, the calibration target for the panoramic camera provides a good place to look for such events. A thin frost was observed by Opportunity's panoramic camera on the rover's 257th sol (Oct. 13, 2004) 11 minutes after sunrise (left image). The presence of the frost is most clearly seen on the post in the center of the target, particularly when compared with the unsegmented outer ring of the target, which is white. The post is normally black. For comparison, note the difference in appearance in the image on the right, taken about three hours later, after the frost had dissipated. Frost has not been observed at Spirit, where the amount of atmospheric water vapor is observed to be appreciably lower. Both images were taken through a filter centered at a wavelength of 440 nanometers (blue).


Link to the press release, check out the cloud images

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/pre.../20041213a.html

Mars and Saturn are more than 90 degrees apart - so whilst it might make some impact - I imagine that actuallly it's very little. Remember, the DSN has multiple antennae at multiple locations. They dont have to talk to just one spacecraft at a time

Doug

There are some images posted, some old some new - no drive yesterday though.

A little more info on the current state of the rovers:

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/rover...ate_041213.html

Spirit is still dogged by a balky front wheel and Opportunity continues to struggle with a shoulder problem. Both have outlasted their 90-day warranties, however, and will have been on Mars for a year in January.

.....I'd hardly say Opportunity was struggling lol

WEll - it's stuck heater isnt really a big problem - especially when they have SO much power - they're going to end up with more power than they started by this time in 4 months I'd guess - it couldnt be better!

Spirit - a little more worrying - 400whr's is a TINY ammount - less than half of Oppy

It'll be interesting to see Oppy's MI images of the solar array (I presume they'll be doing that next week - so as to compare exactly to spirit images w.r.t. exposure to martian atmosphere) - to see how/why they're so clean - and what, if anything, can be done to help spirit in this regard.

Doug

Pedal to the Metal!

Looks like about a 11-12 metre drive thats put them almost straight on top of the turning point from the traverse the rover took before going in - getting back from Pan Point B

Doug

Oppy is in a perfect position to do some IDD work on its own 6 month old tracks. Somebody else mentioned earlier weathering of the wheel tracks, and I think those older trackmarks appear lighter coloured than the brand new ones.

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...40P0705L0M1.JPG

.......What happened to the heatshield plan?

Power-wise - it's more sensible to go straight off the rising slope of the crater - as it's sort of SW facing. So they've bee-lined straight for the flat ground ( sensible )

I assume they will now swing left and head for the heatshield - althought a stop at some of the exposed rocks wouldnt suprise me

Doug

Hey guys, remember that you heard it here first!