Hope you're back soon, Tesheiner, fully recharded from your vacation, since Oppy may get lost without the assistance of her best mapmaker!

You're "roughing it," apparently.

Oppy captured a couple of 6-frame, navcam cloud movies on sol 1614. The best movie had two frames with large dropouts, but the remining four frames show some fascinating cloud formations drifting over Victoria crater. I'm attaching that movie for those who like cloud animations.
Click to view attachment

Yes Stu, truly spectacular! You must submit.

Thanks for reminding me, Zeke4ther. I meant to add my voice to the call.

Stu: There is something about the long shadows in the 3D view that transposes somewhat intangible data into an almost tangible visit to Mars.

I'd call it a serendipitous intersection of art and science, and I think, one of the best images you have shared with us. I can't imagine APOD not finding a place for it.

Thanks, glad so many people like it, but to be honest I'd have missed it completely if Peter59 and fredk hadn't pointed it out... I guess I'm just one of many of us who have gotten out of the habit of checking out the MET hazcam images daily... so thanks to them!

That image just cried out to be made into a 3D, and although it's painfully dark and could be a lot sharper and crisper it just looks so, well, human doesn't it? I know flak has been fired in the past for humanising the rovers, thinking of those chunks of metal, glass and circuit board as something other than just machines, but looking at that shadow stretching off down Duck Bay, almost touching the dune field in the centre of the crater, I get an overwhelming impression of sadness from Oppy... this magnificent crater has been her home for so long... she's watched the Sun wheel around its rim, watched the shadows of the cliffs sweep around her as she's edged ever closer to the foot of Cape Verde... and she was so close, SO close to reaching out and touching it... but now she has to leave without achieving that goal. So like any weary tourist who's run out of time and has to head off to another location she's paused for a moment to drink in the view one last time, looking behind her and remembering what she's achieved and seen inside this amazing, beautiful place, even as she stares at the route ahead, and looks forward to seeing new wonders, and sunsets and sunrises from the world above...

I know... ... but I admit it, I live this stuff, you know!

I don't get that impression. I see this machine amazing its creators and controllers, and encouraging them to push it yet, more forward and onward.

This is no time for sadness. It is again, a time for explorations and new discoveries.

Ok, just me then.

It's a robot. Much as I love them, you really can take the personification stuff too far.

A robot that's been spending months essentially stuck on sandy slopes, getting a broken arm, symptoms of a broken wheel, unable to really get to the beef of the science in there. Time to get out an do some sprinting? Bring it on.

Doug

I know it's a robot. It has no heart, no soul, can't think or feel, but it's come to mean something more to me - and to many people here, I'm sure - than just a chassis crammed with circuit boards and instruments.

Some of us here are engineers and techs, some of us are poets and dreamers. The MER mission has touched us all in different ways. Some have been inspired by the technology, others in the scenery. Me, I've been inspired by the journey, and a stage of that journey is coming to an end. So apologies for attributing feelings to Oppy that obviously can't be there, but it's quite an emotional image that, I think. More than just a shadow on a rocky slope. To me, anyway.

Stu, I think your comments are spot on. Not for the rovers themselves, obviously, but for the many people who have worked so hard to build and operate these devices. The rovers are the physical extensions of these people, who can feel all these things. Or, to use a religious analogy, the body is on Mars, but the soul is here on Earth.

Keep bringing that humanizing element to this forum, Stu. We can't all be scientists, but we can all be entranced by the wonder of it all.

I think the personification is a projection of our own feelings and emotions onto the rovers. It's a natural and human thing to do. The rovers are physical devices created by us, and as such are projections of our minds and hands and bodies onto another world. Why shouldn't we also project our emotions there as well?

Think of the collective will, the fears, the hopes, the wishes of all the people who created these wonderful devices...and then think about how much time we in the UMSF community have collectively spent looking over the shoulders of these robots these past 4 years. That's probably millions of hours spent "living" with Spirit and Oppy. That's a big investment in psychic energy we have made in them!

I feel confident stating that we would not be imparting "feelings" to Spirit and Oppy if they did not have cameras on them. We can't identify with sensors. The photos make us see these rovers in a REAL place.

I also think the mobility aspect makes them somewhat easier for us to identify with, too. For example, I haven't heard much personification going on about Phoenix. We liked Sojourner and called it cute, but we never said the same thing about the Pathfinder lander. (Do we think of the rovers as "pets"?) We like the probes that can reach out and touch things, but again the identification is increased if the probe can move around to get into position.

I have seen some imparting of emotion to space probes (I remember Time Magazine calling Pioneer 10 "plucky"), but again we don't invest them with the same identification as we do the rovers - maybe because they're not sharing our vantage point of 1.75 meters above the ground.

So my opinion is that it's the combination of cameras, mobility, longevity, interacting with the environment, and seeing things from a human point of view that makes us see Spirit and Oppy as friends, fellow travelers on incredible journeys.

Agree mostly! It's like the love to your car that brings you to (new) destinations too.

Tried to adjust the cloud GIF with an inverted sky image. It's 600kb http://www.greuti.ch/oppy/clouds.gif

See - thats our emotions projected upon a robot - that makes sense. One might feel sadness FOR Opportunity at leaving Victoria crater (I feel the opposite), but the vehicle itself does not That's the differentiation of lexicon that makes it make sense.

Doug

So you also are a member of the UMSF semantics club?

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...EHP1214L0M1.JPG

Hmm, the new tracks from the last drive are odd. Hope this slide of the left front wheel is only due to the (particular) slippage of the left rear wheel.

I'm also not sad to be heading out. To be honest, as much as I was relieved to get out of those potentially rover swallowing dunes when Oppy first hit the apron, I find myself missing the almost daily tension that accompanied that journey. I'm looking forward to new sights, new adventures as she makes her way... sorry, as it makes its way to places unknown. Ithaca

Edit: Tman, I'm not quite ready for that tension just yet.

I'm not yet too...

That was very nice! I'm going to have to learn how to do that.

It's no wizardry - is that a common term in English too? - with PhotoShop.
A cloudless sky image, that comes the exposure/illumination of the cloud image as close as possible, has to be inverted (whitish comes blackish and blackish comes whitish). Then this inverted sky image has to cover up as layer 1 the cloud image with (here) 40 percent. Then you may working additionally some adjustments for better contrast of the clouds.

You know, I should be at the beach or at the swimming pool right now, but here I'm "stealing" the kids' notebook in between "torrent" movies.

I'm sad to see Oppy back off from the rock wall, because I think it would have accomplished more science there than it will by heading off now.

I hope I'm wrong!

Thanks, Tman. I had an idea about how you did that, and I was going to experiment with layers in PhotoShop tonight. Now that you have shared your wizardry (Yes, that's the common term in English, too.), I am able to do it.
Edit: That's one of the things I like best about this forum. There are all kinds of damn wizards hanging around here.

As are you.

Yeah she drives http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...FDP1213R0M1.JPG

Quite striking view on the navcam: http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...FDP1997R0M1.JPG
I don't see why the lower part of the image is so much lighter. It seems to be a real feature of the ground and not some optical effect of the came, as visible on other navcam images.

In both the images you linked to it's the same optical effect causing the lighter areas. With the steep slope we're often looking into the sun on these shots and we're seeing some glare onto the camera. The two images overlap a bit, and in one frame the overlapped region is light and in the other it's dark, so it can't be real surface brightness.

There's another angle of this illumination http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...EHP1997R0M1.JPG

Maybe a mirror effect from an optic part that causes some mixup in the exposure.

OK, it's clearly an optical effect then. I haven't seen it so clear in navcam images before.

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...GBP1314R0M1.JPG

Beautiful...

Click to view attachment

<keanu> woah! </keanu> Fabulous anaglyph too Stu. Is it my imagination or are they edging steadily closer to the lowest possible angle of incident sunlight falling on the slope, ie just the upper relief from the slope illuminated? There seem to have been a lot of similarly framed and timed shots of late.

...and I wonder what the cost per sol number's down to now?

I wonder if that shadow shot was timed and planned :-)

I would say yes.

The normal end of drive hazcams were taken as planned at 13:00 LST



Then hours later at 16:35LST another rear hazcam shot was taken, and taken at a higher quality.



I can see no need for that apart from for coolness.

Once Opportunity is back on the rim, it would be so cool to capture a movie-like sequence of the rising shadows in Victoria with the Navcam or a Hazcam - just to say goodbye.

Could it be possible regarding power level or capturing in more than one/two sol?

For approx $20m/year, you get about 710 sols (355, twice ) - about $28,200 per rover per sol.

The orig 90 x 2 sols for approx $850m was about $4.7m per rover per sol

Just by way of comparison, the cost of a full fuel load for a heavy jetliner (747, 777, etc.) is right now around $166,000. That's a bit more than 50% of operating costs for a day considering labor, etc. So, the bottom line is that the amortized costs of running the rovers this long are comparable to that of running a very small (two-ship fleet) regional airline; what a great deal for the taxpayers!!!

Two parts of a panoramic taken on Sol 1613.


And a "pseudo-fisheye" view of the escape path (I imagine )

Sorry to be all engineering-minded here, but I thought those images were to get better lighting around the rear wheels. In the afternoon they're in shadows and it can be hard to make anything out.

But I sure love the images!

Less per sol than a stay at the Ty Warner Penthouse Four Seasons in Manhattan

And better views, too

Well maybe.

But I would have thought a longer exposure while the wheels were in shadow would have been better than doing that if it were needed. Then you would have a nice diffuse illumination with no shadows of the wheel itself obscuring part of the ground.

Guess you mean rather those http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...DCP1314R0M2.JPG

The front wheels appear to be on solid rock once again.

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...IEP1212L0M1.JPG

A view from sol 1619...

Sol 1623 - little progress, but progress!
Click to view attachment Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

Where are you finding those images? The exploratorium URL's that I have are still only up to sol 1621.

Brian

As they are 200x200 pixels they must be from the Pancam Data Tracking site. Nice work keeping us updated Peter.

Which wheel is it that gave them problems on Oppy? As they begin to make their way out of Victoria, has that wheel motor been behaving itself?

It's the left front wheel that got a current spike. So far it looks like it works still fine!