I guess "to the cape" no longer applies, so a new thread is in order. From the new PS update:


The plan is to exit via the entry route.

Also some interesting news on the next destination from the same article:

Oh no, that's really sad news. Having to drive out of the crater just as we were nearing the cliff face...

Wow... she really is leaving...

OK, then thanks for showing us such sensational sights Oppy, we're all very proud of you back here. Now, get yourself out again, take a breather in the full sunshine - you've earned it - and then head on for sights and wonders new.

Well, time to leave.
It was becoming really difficult, if not impossible, to get to that wall so I understand the change of plans. In any case, if the left front wheel really stalls I have the feeling it will be "end of mobility" anywhere; here or at the plains. This terrain, Meridiani, is too sandy to drive with a stuck wheel.

Erebus fits that distance and heading.

But Erebus isn't unnamed lol

Do they have plans to take a full pan of the wall first or are they trying to get out of there like bat out of hell?

Guess that damn slope & the slippery terrain was just too much for her....dammit. One hell of an effort, in any case, and safe journey to Erebus!

Huh. Do you suppose they'll get another chance to look at rock this deep? They never really imaged any of the wall closely. And now they suddenly have to leave. Most mysterious.

In the current Planetary Society Mars Rover Update. Opportunity will start to explore the cobbles after leaving the slippery slopes of Victoria Crater and then head about 2 kilometers to the north/northwest from its current location to an unnamed crater. Does anyone have any overhead views which might show which crater they are talking about?

So, it's back to Erebus. Click to view attachment Oh well, at least she has a track to follow now.

Gonna go out on a limb here & suggest that that wheel stall was the decision point event. The terrain here is supremely difficult, with occasional slippage rates greater than 90%; getting stuck for good right now wouldn't seem to be in the mission's best interest if they can do other things within the vehicle's capabilities.

I recall them saying they'd go into the crater even if they got stuck there forever. Ah well, maybe they won't be able to make it out and they'll look at the wall after all.. I doubt there's anything comparable out on the plains.

Yes, the maximum-age layers remain unanalyzed.
But, truth be told, I have searched long for visually distinctive strata, and seen nothing striking.
It was always a small hope - a couple of dozen meters out of 800.
Perhaps we should strive for new horizons.

(sound of piteous sobs and sighs...)

And I have explicitly heard Squyres say they're had no intention of getting stuck and always intended to get in - do science - and get out.

A good call by the team. Condition monitoring revealing a high probability of a known failure mode, get the rover to a position where some movement will be possible. High slippage slopes and dunefields are not a good environment and a crater over a kilometer away would seem a touch risky, so maybe they will stick to the annulus. But who knows. The design of these vehicles is a tribute to all those involved and they just keep hanging in there.

Hardly mysterious, unless you really want to see a conspiracy. The decision making process regarding the rovers has always been extremely open, with all the facts laid bare to the interested public. Much more information than we could demand.

Not bedrock, but they want to get out and look at the cobbles. These may have come from much deeper... or far away. I don't know what the thinking is on their origin.

We should not forget that one of the great benefits of the rovers being so long-lived, is that the scientists can do "target research".
It is quite possible that full analysis of data obtained "in a hurry" while traveling south to reach Victoria has lead to important clues that call for
a second more detailed look (i.e. the cobbles in this case). If the scientists judge that the benefits of examining the cape's walls are less
prominent than their new science target, it is not a surprise that they choose to get out and pursue that target instead.

PS. Not to mention the "born to be wild" feeling of roving in the plains, too

I'll have to go to Mars myself..

From the latest update:

Anyone offer a guess as to which super-res sequence shows this?

Does anyone have any overhead views of the area to the North of Victoria that might show this unnamed crater. I have a feeling it's not Erebus
and it's another one.

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/tm-.../MERB_766_1.jpg

FWIW, I don't see how it could be anything but Erebus.



-- Pertinax

That's the wierd thing - Erebus (and Terra Nova, adjacent and overlapping) are both names - but are the only large craters to the NNW.

If, perhaps, they meant to say WNW, then there's a large eroded crater at that sort of range.

Doug

Erebus. A bit boring, not the target I'd have chosen (Ithaca!), but at least the scenery will be changing. In many ways I prefer the journey to the destination.

It's been awhile since I've looked at the satellite images, but from what I remember (dunes, drifts, sand) I have a hard time understanding how they could go W-NW, even with perfect mobility. Cobbles are great, but sure would love to see some new terrain. Who knows, if they covered some new ground, maybe they might find some interesting cobbles.

Is this the super-res image of the lower dune field that interested Hayes and Lauren Edgar so much?:

http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/p...B0P2534R2M1.JPG

This image is part of a large set of apparently identical sub-frame images and so I assume that it is a super-res image. I would really appreciate it if someone was to process this image and other images of Capo Verde to bring out the details that interest MER geologists so much. The panorama which I have seen which seems to best show details of sedimentary structures is the following pan by ant103:

http://www.db-prods.net/blog/wp-content/up...2-quickview.jpg

I think that this pan shows a sequence of cross bedded strata formed by winds blowing from South to North, followed by horizontally bedded strata, followed by cross bedded strata formed by winds blowing from North to South.

I realise that what I call horizontally bedded strata is actually tillted at about 10 degrees to the South. However what I am assuming is that the whole of the Capo Verde cliff has been tilted 10 degrees to the South by subsidence of the wall of Victoria crater.

On many occasions SS has expressed an interest in looking at cobbles on the plains after Oppy is finished with Victoria. I guess that his reason is that there is not much variety in the rocks of Meridiani and so the opportunity for Oppy to look at more meteorites and at rocks from elsewhere on Mars (such as "Bounce") is attractive.

I think that Oppy's first scientific target after it has left Victoria on its road to Erebus or a similar crater may be an exotic cobble close to Beagle crater described in the following Opportunity Update:

"Sol 875: ... Opportunity used its panoramic camera and miniature thermal emission spectrometer on a distant potential meteorite; ..."

There are nice color and false color photos of this rock in the following post:

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...ost&p=61844

The following map shows the general area that Oppy was in in SOL 875:

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...ost&id=7283

An advantage of Opportunity attempting to drive in the general direction of Erebus crater is that most of the journey could be accomplished without crossing ridge crests. Opportunity only got stuck in Purgatory because it attempted to cross a ridge crest.

Once Opportunity has passed Erebus crater then this will open up the possibility of Opportunity driving many many km across the very easy driving country it encountered at the start of its mission. Anyone who does not believe that Opportunity can drive at least another 12 km should read the following quote from the latest Planetary Society MER update:

These rovers are about 100 years in rover years, but who knows," Soderblom mused, "maybe they'll live to 200. The fact that they're still making such significant discoveries deep into their missions sort of says – don't give up on these missions when they're halfway through," he said. We need to keep the funding there to let them get all the fruits they can."

I'd like to see a focus on the cobbles as well. They're interesting, and probably have a variety of origins (mostly actual meteorites or ejecta from impacts, I'd suspect.) Either way, they seem to offer a way to examine materials from places beyond Oppy's physical capability to reach

Like these, for example: Rock Pile
As we rolled by them, I thought it a shame that we didn't have time to poke around in there.
Maybe we'll get another chance on the way back up north.

I hope we'll get a closer look at these rocks, they fascinated me as we scooted on past, especially that hard-looking blocky one among the crumbly-looking ones (apologies for the technical terms!)...

Click to view attachment

Oh, come now, Stu -- you *know* that geologists just made up words like "friable" so's they could say a rock was crumbly and sound all ed-jee-cated while saying it...

-the other Doug

I am so ready to get get back out on the plains in search of the cobble float! Giddyup. I have my list of favorites that were neglected back up the trail. This should be fun. It appears that there were several superres sets taken in the area of the proposed contact. I think the raw image you provided a link to was one of the clearest examples. The set contained images from several filters, but the L6 filter was most numerous, and also the one most likely to provide the best resolution of these layers. I am attaching an attempt to coax some resolution from them. These are difficult for me, and the official version will be much better than my attempt with the raw jpegs, but I think I managed to improve the resolution of the bedrock somewhat. The talus below the cliff was degraded in this image, though.

Click to view attachment

It's curious that they suggested that highres and superres imagery helped identify the contact. It was pretty apparent in previous images and panoramas, and quite clear in the panorama from ant103 that you linked to. Perhaps those images were the highres ones they referred to.

But to be honest, I have to agree with shaka. I've searched dilligently for distinctive stratigraphy/mineralogy, too, and I haven't seen it in the depths of this crater. Finding one fossil Martian dune field overriding a predecessor is a pretty nifty observation for a rover...don't get me wrong. I don't want to marginalize it. This is one for the robotic rockhound textbooks. But, such a thing is to be expected, and is a relatively common occurence in terrestrial rocks. Let's also not forget that there is another story of the rocks being collected by the MER's geochemical instruments, the details of which we have less access to, and which it seems apparent to this observer, that there is a rich story unfolding.

As we all consider the news about the discovery of the base of a dune unit, don't forget the qualifiers published in that update. PaulM: I know what you are saying about the S-to-N and N-to-S laminations, but this Cape is only one small outcrop. I don't think we confidently know the morphology of these dunes/ripples. Are they barchans, linear, transverse, star, or one of the other varieties? The team may eventually tell us. Surely that is one of the reasons they decided to drive around part of Victoria, to observe the lateral stratigraphic variations in the capes and bays.

Oh yeah, and did I note that they appeared to be friable, as well?

I'm happy...*

How could we ever reach Ithaca from inside that crater?...



* and back...

THERE you are!!!

(shouts off to the side: "It's okay guys, you can stop scanning Portugal with HiRISE, we've found him..." )

Thought you'd fallen into some abyss somewhere!
What do you hear from SS these days?

Not much...been sniffing to much perchlorate to know with certainty what I've been doing...

Didn't you see the Warning label on MECA?
"Don't try this at home!"

Hey! At my home I'm free to try what I want!

I knew you were an extremofree kind of guy...
Welcome back anyway on the other busy place of Mars

New hazcam pics at exploratorium show no significant movement. I'm thinking they will be giving this spot a name shortly.

Edit: It even looks a bit like they might be trying to back up.

There was a bit of a turn to the left. And yet another late afternoon hazcam shot. I'd guess they're doing these late shots to improve the lighting on the rear wheel area. But a few more of these shots and we'll have a nice sunset shadows animation!

Still a difficult situation to get progress there

Yes, such an animation would be cool. From the update 02.08 there's an afternoon sun over the cliff around 14:54 LTST/sol1607. The only ground image that matches is from sol1603/11:46. However, the two merged looks nice:

Significant progress today.

Sol 1612
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...DCP1214R0M1.JPG

Sol 1614
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...DKP1202R0M1.JPG
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...DXP1214R0M1.JPG

A turn in place followed by a long drive uphill on sol 1613 - I think we may be free of Quackmire 2!

And again a spectacular late afternoon Oppy-shadow-stretching-into-the-crater shot.

Edit - scooped by Peter!

Very nice indeed - in two respects!

What a straight turn to the left.

Time for one last look at the crater floor before turning and heading out..?

Click to view attachment

Stu, definitely submit it to APOD!

pheww that's a relief, making some progress at last. Was starting to get a little nervous about that situation.

Glad to see her free from the mess. Let's see if the progress is steady on the next days.

And now back to lurk mode.
(I'm in the middle of my summer vacations and found that the campsite has a wifi connection.)