I'm not so sure. It was clearly a deliberate manoeuvre into a deep ripple, so perhaps it was a test of the latest autonomous driving /anti-slip functions? RoverDriver's said there are sure to be "embedding events" out there on the plains in future; 100m worth of driving into the same dune, Purgatory style, would be Bad. Automated backing-out if embedding's detected, perhaps?

Good point. I'm still glad she turned back tho.

This was done intentionally. No we are not crazy. There was a pretty compelling IDD target in front of the rover but the excessive slip prevented the rover from getting there (we were about 1.5m short). We knew very well this could have resulted in a mini-embedding event but believed the risk of getting stuck there permanently was very low.

Paolo

Go Oppy Go!
Click to view attachment(Sol1659)

Have you noticed that the little ripples in front of us in dilo's image are visible in the HiRise image of the route map by Eduardo (post 2345) of today?
I'm confident, once the general path will be decided, it should "easy" to navigate using the upcoming HiRise imagery...
So, at this stage, on top of "Go Oppy Go", I'll say "Go UMSF image wizards, Go"...

On the Road Again

So Long Duck Bay. May Oppy's Journeys Lead to Amazing New Discoveries

By seeing the long tracks toward Duck Bay, I'm feeling a little nostalgic. Oppy is closing a page of his life and open one other.

The Sputnik crater on Sol 1661 :


And the same pano but in anaglyph :


The deepness of Sputnik is quite impressive

> Oppy is closing a page of his life and open one other.

Nice words, ant. I think it's the right time to close this thread and open a new one.
Let's continue here: Last stops around Victoria, before the Long Trek

The above small hollow has attracted my attention since it is not common to have small holes along the rimes of the crater. How its formed hole might be explained? I think it is a peculiar case.

It's not unusual. It's a little impact crater called Sputnik.

Phil

Using the VirtualDub/AVISynth script discussed in the Phoenix thread, I revisited the Victoria Egress Navcam movie:

Small version (256x256, 8Mb)
Medium version (512x512, 30Mb)
Large version (1024x1024, 117Mb)

The process introduces some weird artifacts toward the bottom of the image, but the rest of the image looks like full-motion video. It's amazing what free software can do nowadays. It even seems to "know" when it's a new drive/sol and crossfades the image.

Pretty cool movie.

On a previous drive inside VC, it turns out that not only did Opportunity take a "movie" while driving, it took the movie in stereo. This movie has a lower percentage of correctly interpolated frames than the egress movie because the images were taken farther apart and downsampled to 256x256. But that doesn't really matter, since this is a FULL MOTION STEREO MOVIE taken on the surface of Mars. That is truly astounding. All we need now is color images and IMAX resolution.

Anaglyph (~5Mb, 256x256)
Side-by-Side (~11Mb, 256x256)

BTW, for those interested in the process, this explains how to do this "synthetic slo-mo" and this is what I used to combine the two views into stereo.

Hmmm, I don't remember any intentional movie frames taken during the drive. What it looks like is the visual odometry frames we take whenever we need to evaluate slip. What sol was this? What frames did you use?

Paolo

This was from sol 1625, using the 256x256 navcam images (there were 31 stereo pairs, 2 of which had signal drops in one "eye").

OK, if these were 256x256 they were the Visual Odometr images as I had suspected. They were taken at each step of the drive.

Paolo

I fired up MMB today and noticed that the two data drops I mentioned have been fixed. Here is a new version of the stereo movie, with the two new images as well as with settings tweaked so that there aren't any straight fades between frames. I also doubled the framerate, so this is now approximately 500x realtime instead of 1000x.

Anaglyph (11 Mb)
Freeviewing (22 Mb)

Hi,

I'm really impressed by the quality of the work you guys are doing here, and by the discussion level on the few topics I've lurked here for a few days now.
I first-post here, cause seeing Oppy roving on Mars in this short movie blew my mind ! And I guess you've already done a long movie of her full drive from the beginning. I've been searching it for a few days, but didn't find it, so I ask you, where is it please ?

And BTW, sorry for the mistakes or the strange spelling, I'm french

I haven't been here long; the movies of Opportunity (and Spirit)'s entire progress have been produced by many others, including NASA/JPL. An example of an early one of those is here. In these movies, the images come from the hazard cameras instead of the navcam, and the rover appears to jump from place to place. The technique I used could not be applied to the complete mission for two reasons: one, Opportunity has not take the necessary pictures every few decimeters for the entire mission, and two, it takes hours to process the movie for just one sol's worth of images. If anyone knows of any other optical navigation frames that seem to make a movie, please post them!

Since we're talking movies, I took a look to see whether MMB's movie-generation facilities still work. Somewhat to my surprise, they still do. Here then is a reprojected version of the Exit movie (Quicktime 1.8MB)

Sometime if I have time I'll do an extended version; there's a whole string of great navigation sequences leading up to 'the big one' here.

An improved and slower version of the egress movie:

Large (231 Mb, 1024x1024)
Medium (60 Mb, 512x512)
Small (16 Mb, 256x256)

Wow! MMB is so powerful. How come this capability doesn't exist in the production version?

It does. I'd love to see you combine MMB's reprojected frames with your morphing technique. That might be pretty awesome actually.

I'll go through the images and adjust the brightness on some of them so that they match a bit better in MMB.

Here's a dramatically lit Quicktime VR view from Sol 1632, just before she left the crater. Zoom out and pan down for the neatest view...

Welcome to the forum. You will not need to worry too much about spelling or grammar here. Your English is better than some native speakers who frequent the place. It's always good to welcome a new member. I think there are many links to interesting movies embedded within the comments in the threads here, but they can be difficult to find.

That was pretty nice, mhoward.

For people who want to download a larger version: Large version of the Victoria Crater Exit movie (QuickTime 11MB). This one's sized for my own 1680x1050 display. Please download the smaller version (1.8 MB) if you're just browsing.

Bienvenu leFab!
Some discutions are not so easy to follow sometimes but the pictures and movies are
"Trouble" with the rovers is that there is nearly 5 years worths of pictures & data here.
Nous sommes quelque fidèles ici: Ant, VikingMars, Rakir et j'en oublie...

I applied the morphing technique to mhoward's reprojected movie, as he suggested:

Large (30 Mb)
Medium (9 Mb)
Small (3 Mb)

I actually prefer the nonprojected version since the whole point is to show the rover's motion, and reprojecting the frames evens this motion out and makes it seem as if the rover is driving in a parking lot. However, since the navcam is pointable, reprojecting the frames allows for a change in pointing without a jumpy video. This combined with the ability of MMB to export a video which itself changes pointing could create some great clips.

Since we're talking exiting VC...
Some may think this is an exercise in futility, but does this sunlit angle of Duck Bay show Oppy's tracks.
Real or imagined? Whatdoyouthink!?
Click to view attachment
It's a lovely image in any case - Oppy's home for the past year.

What are these parts visible in the recent Oppy panoramas:
I guess these are attachment point for the solar panels when these were folded? Official denomination?
Didn’t find it here: http://hobbiton.thisside.net/rovermanual/
Nor on the NASA websites … so where else to turn

Which bit of it? There's solar array mounting pyros on the left, solar cells alongt he middle, and the shoulder of the IDD on the right.

Solar Array Pyro on the left , thanks Doug!

Yeah - pyro-bolts that held the arrays together before deployment.

So concluding this topic, we can say that Opportunity:
came out of Victoria Crater on Thursday 28th August 08 (sol 1634)
left Victoria Crater on Friday 17th October 08 (sol 1683)