Well that one sure is a keeper.

Sol 1666 seems to be one more for the books: ~130m The Penultimate RHAZ is really cool.

Sweet... ...saved to the hard drive for future reference...

I looked everywhere for Paolo's teaser sol 1666 Penultimate RHAZ image. I couldn't even find the thumbnail at this time.

Edited: I just remembered that we only find thumbnails of pancams at the pancam tracking database interface.

I like the new traverse maps, in concept, but it seems we might still find better ones here. I don't understand why so much of the background HiRise resolution is obscured. Was something lost in translation to jpg?

If you refer to the third map, only the middle one is in full resolution maybe fading a bit due to colorizing or less sharpening.

Super this new concept!

(Stu leans out of car window...)

Hey, guys! Look over there!!

Click to view attachment

( EDIT: wider angle view here )

Stu, did I ever told you that you're at 3D's what Eduardo is at Oppy's route map?
Thanks so much, this view is very very inspiring and I guess we've gona miss it pretty soon or ???
But anyway, when one get a 22' screen, the original post is much better than a wider angle that take only half of the screen

Here it is, with a bit of gamma correction because the original is too dark, at least the JPEG.
Click to view attachment

The middle of a working week, a beautiful day outside,
and here I am, stranded at home, after catching a cold on a funeral...

And then Stu takes me to Mars and puts me in the rim of a crater, with this breathtaking scenario and with little cobbles around for me to kick...
This is what friends are for...
Brilliant!

Q & D polar projection of the navcam mosaic taken on sol 1664.
We can see Cape Verde almost to the N (top) and "Cape Pillar" to the ENE.
Click to view attachment

Did Oppy just drive 283 meters in two drives ?

Give or take a few meters, depending on if we are talking about net distance or "odometer", but the answer is basically YES!!!!


Now, wait a minute!

That means we have already crossed the 12km mark!!!

Only 11.717 to go!

Cool to know that if Oppy kept this average (141.5) everysol she would arrive Endeavour in 82 sols!
I'm deliberately not taking into account that we're not driving in a straight path towards the crater...but, optimist as I am I see the 2 year drive as a very conservative timeline...

I tried to correct the penultimate rhaz. Here it is.

Paolo

It took 5 sols to cover that distance. Not two. Two drives - but five sols.

And this is just about the best driving terrain we'll ever have, and we wont have it for long ( at this pace ).

A fast couple of months, then it's going to be painfull.

I'm not moaning but:
Do you know why it took 5 days?
Restricted sols can explain 3 days instead of 2 ,and isn't MRO started relaying data from MERs?
Can there be a "restricted sol" with 2 orbiters relaying data?
Anyway.....these last 2 drives were just great.

The file with "25cm" in the filename is at the full resolution of the HiRISE mosaic. The Navcam overhead is rendered at 1cm/pixel for the planning tool, but unless folks can open something like Jpeg 2000 format, putting a 1cm/pixel zoom of the map on the rover website would be difficult. Easy to produce, though.

-Tim.

I averaged the distance we covered between the heatshield and Purgatory, and came up with something like 30m/day, which includes weekends and sols we stayed for science purposes. Between Purgatory and Beagle Crater, our average slowed to less than 15m/day.

But things are different now. We have this awesome HiRISE coverage (which, in a few days will be complete all the way past Endeavor's west rim) to help us plan our route through, or around the "purgatoids" south of Victoria. After about 3-5km of slogging through fields of purgatoids, the ripples drop off in size dramatically (and we go down a broad 60 meter slope), and so far as I can tell at this point, the surface should look more like the plains around Endurance than the ripple fields we've been dealing with around the Victoria annulus.

-Tim.

MRO isn't doing MER relay at the moment as I understand it.

Restricted sols are not a symptom of relay schedules however. Odyssey will usually get a good pass in most days at about 4pm, MRO would get one (if used ) at about 3pm local.

The restriction is a symptom of rover-night and pasadena-day being out of sync. i.e. you have to start planning for Sol N+1 before you have the data for Sol N. Sol N's data can only be used for planning Sol N+2

So - as a result, everything sort of takes twice as long as you might expect. Tie that in with the fact that they didn't get post-drive imagery down until the sol AFTER the first drive, then you can see how the days add up.

No, it's going to be wonderful. We have a long term goal again and we should savour each and every day that we are given to share on this journey. There will be days of tension and exhilaration, of confusion and outright boredom. We will see frustration for both the "Why are we stopping to look at this?" and the "Why didn't we stop to look at that?" crowds. I picture Tesheiner hunched over at his computer peering at polar projections and trying to match them up to HiRISE pictures to plot locations. I see anaglyphs from Stu of every rock and ripple we pass, with the occasional poem tossed in to keep things in the proper perspective. Our many route mappers will continue to show Paolo and the other drivers the way, and occasionally there will be instances where they will appear to have followed our advice. The image magicians will poke and prod at the handful of pixels that are the distant rim segments to try and pull details out. There might even be another beacon.

82 days? I'm looking forward to months of free entertainment. It doesn't get any better than this.

Okay...

I've been working on this for a while, time to set it free...

Some of you will like it, some of you will hate it. Fair enough. It's what I feel.


ENDEAVOUR CALLS…

What once was a beguiling, beckoning bowl –
A gargoyle-edged hole carved in the great
Meridiani Plain – is now falling far behind;
A rapidly-thinning line drawn between the high
Cathedral dome of Mars’ pastel-pink sky
And the pebble-spattered, track-trenched
Ground. What we found down there,
On the cliff-shadowed slopes of fair Victoria
Made us stop and stare in wonder:
Rocks sculpted into sheaths of brittle, broken blades
By millennia of dust-drenched wind;
Slanting shafts of sunlight shining
On the sea of sand dunes at its heart;
Book-leaf layers of ancient stone, glowing
Amber and gold as twilight faded to night…
What memories we leave behind..!

But on the flat and far horizon now
A new adventure calls, and if the fates allow,
If an already-weary rover’s battered body
Can somehow find the strength to carry on
For one more stolen year, one sol Opportunity will hear
Us scream and shout out in delight at the impossible sight
Of Endeavour’s Mordor hills looming up before her eyes.
And then, content, we will smile, re-living each heroic mile
Before telling Oppy “That’s far enough. Rest now, little one,
Your work is done.” And then, at last, she’ll sleep
A deep and dreaming sleep, with History as her pillow.
And here on Earth we’ll celebrate a noble rover’s
Journey across the endless dry and rippled sea
of the Great Plain of Meridiani.

© Stuart Atkinson 2008

I love it, Stu.

Tim53, that image is now on my desktop.

The Navcam view on Sol 1666 is iconic. Here is a partial QuickTime VR (1.7 MB).

The Pancams are also great, but I'll let somebody else deal with those...

Yeah, you were not here for Purgatory ripple. The adventure is wonderfull. The journey great, but, some of the footsteps can be very very painfull indeed.

Show of hands for those who enjoyed the stop-over at Purgatory and Olympia......wow - no hands

I see what you're saying - but it's not going to be like a path of joy the entire way.

Doug

Aren't you optimistic that Opportunity's new roving software will really shine and allow for a nearly trouble-free trip? Certainly no Purgatorys will be allowed. Maybe an aborted drive every now and then. One is not crazy to hope for this much, no?

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...23P1818L0M2.JPG

Any idea what the odd feature in the sky (top left) is?

Great words from BrianL...
Wonderful indeed, each and every one of us as part of the original Endeavour crew, facing challenges and delighting us with moments of pure beauty, exploring unroved ground...
The journey...the journey! Not the arrival!

Doug, it could not possibly be a path of joy the entire way...because, simply, that is not the nature of the Epics!

Of course we can think that getting stucked for too many sols is a dreadful think to happen but...at this distance...would the road to Victoria have been the same without Purgatory? Doug, it could not possibly be a path of joy the entire way...because, simply, that is not the nature of the Epics! These require Drama!

EDITED: Stu, fantastic poem, but..."rest now little one..."?!
I thought you had learned something in the last days about Oppy's powers to surprise us...by then she'll be, not trekking, but flying her way out of Endeavour...

marsophile...looks like the first martian attempt to launch a rover towards Earth was successful!

I can only do a quick stitch of that mosaic.
Click to view attachment

This was a "drive direction" mosaic, meaning that the plan is to go on that direction. "Cape Victoria" might be our next stop and the view from here towards Cabo Frio, Verde, St Mary should be impressive.

Yes, it should be

360 degree view on Sol 1664 (anyone is thirsty ) :


And the 1666 non-complete view, the same as the -beautiful- Michael Howard pan

It looks like the antenna on my desktop weather alert radio. I don't actually believe that is what it is, but I wanted to get the ball rolling.

Jack

Thanks Paolo, so you're not only driving, you can manage imagery!
Well, anyway, I'll be more confortable if you stay focused in the drive dirrection instead of the rear

Endeavour is SO big that even when we'll "arrive", we'll not be there yet. From now on, it's going to be ONLY a journey Rui, only a journey

At times it's safer or easier for the rovers to drive backwards.


Paolo Amoroso

I am focussed on driving. That specific image was captured to visually inspect the tracks before turning the vehicle to a heading that would maximize uplink to Odyssey.
Knowing what heppened on the previous drive will help in setting up the next one. In this specific image, clean track, no signs of sinkage, Opportunity was sober.

Paolo

True. In what instances it is best to drive backwards?

Paolo

Uphill, or when either front wheel is locked

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...FP1997R0M1.HTML

The feature also appears in

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...23P1818L0M1.JPG

so it is not a cosmic ray hit.

It looks like it could be a rock being blasted into the air on a ballistic trajectory by a nearby meteor strike, however unlikely that may be.

No - those two images are one and the same - the M1 at the end is the first produced version of that image. If a piece of it doesn't come down, or comes down again, they make an M2 version or M3 etc etc.

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...23P1818R0M1.JPG
and
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...3P1818RL0M1.JPG

Were taken at the same time - and the feature is only in one - so it is an imaging artifact, not a real object.

An image artifact?
And here I was thinking that crazy swiss rocketman had made it this far...
Click to view attachment

Are you sure Doug?...

I remember reading that it was thought that one of Spirit's front wheels developed a problem because the front wheels on Rovers are most highly stressed. I thought that for this reason that during Opportunity's trek to Victoria it was decided to alternate between driving forwards and driving backwards every few SOLs to even out the wear on Opportunity's 6 wheels.

Am I correct?

Because, I think, it ensures even distribution of lubricant.

The Speedy Turtle striked again...

I'll say it's a large wooden badger flying off a catapult.



Run away! run away!

Clearly a donkey leaving a trebuchet.

I think that the rocker bogie system is designed to equally distribute the load on all 6 wheels on flat terrain. The reason for switching between forward and backward driving was to equally distribute lubricant and wear.

Paolo

Correct! I will come up with some more trivia.

Paolo

I've been thinking for awhile that Paolo needs a special status more befitting than Junior Member and now I have it...

Quizmaster!

This is a consequence of of our fast driving. It is a pebble that was squashed between one of the wheels and the terrain.

Paolo

Out of curiosity.. What sort of things would cause this in particular to appear in an image?

Thanks, Tim. Although I couldn't see any file name containing "25 cm," my observation was in error. I was using someone else's computer last night and it apparently had a very old or faulty monitor. Now that I am back on my machine, the maps look great. I was certainly not trying to suggest that we needed 1 cm/px route maps.

I love it! I am going to work very hard to add that word to my vocabulary.