Some mistake, here ...

Around 50m were added to the odometer during sol 1857 and Opportunity is currently located next to another "mini-crater". No name for the time being.
Check this polar view.
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Agree. Actually, Paolo gave such hint on Spirit's thread.
BTW, tosol drive looks to have been moving backwards. Compare the polar view with this rhaz picture: http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportu...3ZP1312L0M1.JPG

I think there was a missing decimal point - maybe should have been 950.3 km/hr.

Oops - my bad - yep just 950km/h - the 3 was entirely spurious. Not as fast as Mach 15 but still quite speedy.

I'd said this is still the Beacon:
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Does somebody remember the distance from Vicky where we first sew it?

Yes, that is the Beacon. We're currently about 2.8 km from the Beacon, as the Martian crow flies.

Our first glimpse of the Beacon was on sol 775, almost 3 Earth years ago (see for example this post). At that time we were only about 1.8 km from the Beacon. Because of the higher north rim of Victoria and absence of ridges to the south to block our view, we can see the Beacon much farther away now than on approach. And remember the image you posted was navcam, so with pancam we should be able to see it much farther away still.

MMB - I don't think your the only one Astro0!! You've inspired me to get out of my armchair this weekend - at least as far as the PC and download it.

Oppy pic - if you look carefully you can see it's genuine as you can just spot the wing tip turbulence. For the nay sayers, there is a clear logical rebuttal - no wing tip turbulence, well in the low gravity conditions and thin atmosphere of Mars Oppy has obviously hit a particularly steep dune at full speed and voila..... up, up and away.

I feel sorry for Paolo - getting back after a good Easter break - and suddenly having to retrain in such a major way. Such is the life of a rover driver pilot .

Still a few missing/corrupted bit of data from the Resolution Panorama I'll wait for those before doing the full version. I'm not sure when I'll get to do that though, so in the meantime here is my current 'draft':



James

My God, James, what an incredible panorama! I've said it before, and I'll say it again, this is to me exactly what Mars is "supposed" to look like. And this panaorama captures not only the the Meridiani scene, but also the human element -- the amazing workings of our little rover! Well done! Well done!

Two interesting notes from the latest status report:

... these small craters -- just a few meters or yards in diameter -- are from fairly recent impacts, occurring in the last, maybe, 10,000 to 100,000 years...

... wheel currents have returned to more normal levels for the right-front wheel's drive actuator...

hi everyone! ) I have one little question for you. What is it? It's looks like a seam Maybe it is boundary between 2 photos...

Oops...here we go again...

Click to view attachment
You're right Tesheiner...

EDITED: Where is "94 days delay included" it should be read "119 days...", it makes all the difference...

For those thinking "why Porcupine?":
http://www.deepseascape.org/history.php

> What is it? It's looks like a seam Maybe it is boundary between 2 photos...

Well, it's not an artifact created by GE because this discontinuity is also visible in the map projected JPEG2000 images.
I have two guesses:
1. Something in the map projection software
2. It's a boundary between two CCDs in HiRISE.

Here's a similar artifact near the same area but on a different picture.
Click to view attachment

Yes, a seam between two CCDs. This is quite common in HiRISE images.

Phil

According to this latest map from Ustrax, it's now clear why Oppy made that little "wrong-way" drive on sol 1820: she tried to keep to Ustrax's proposed path!

It also explains the elevated currents in the RF wheel.
She was trying to turn right, but they wouldn't let her

And you were doubtful?!

Regarding the 1860 driver. There are no images for the end of the 1859 or 1860 drives at either the rover home or exploratorium sites. Was the 1860 drive planned based on the 1857 data? Can the rovers be driven blind for a second sol (without fresh navcam and/or pancam images) using the current software? I'm reading Scott's Mars and Me, at at the begining of the mission I think you couldn't. Possibly images our down, but just not available to us. Can Paolo, or anyone answer my questions.

On the raw image pages. There are, however, images on the ground, that the team can see. Probably just one of those 'give the server a kick' moments that happens from time to time in the raw JPG pipeline.

Looking back.... over my shoulder...

Click to view attachment

Walking
UR doing it wrong

Roving, roving, roving...


90+ meters were added to the odometer this sol (1863) and we've covered almost half of Porcupine's diameter. Not really crossing but just bordering the crater (or its remains 'cause I can't really see it on the navcams).
Check the route map in a few minutes...

I'm loving the pace it's setting

And I think it will improve in a few hundred meters. We are approaching an area which looks it has smaller ripples so we may see longer drives, imo.

Ditto ! it's so good to see her making steady progress like this

Thisol (1864) the drive was greater then 130m.
Lovely pace.

Lead foot

Some very interesting rocks and stones around Oppy at the moment...

Click to view attachment

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I was trying to correlate the latest ground images with HiRISE earlier today and was completely baffled. It never occurred to me to search so far away!

These machines and the people who operate them never cease to amaze me. Their resiliency and adaptability are nothing short of astounding.

For the record, your first image shows Adventure crater back on sol 1852, and the second shows the ground (Cook Islands) at our long stopover next to Resolution crater, way back on sol 1831.

Yeah. That's a quarter of a kilometer back!

...See ya!

Okay... recently...

I'm still amazed by these looong drives. Some tidbits from today's one (as I see it): it started around noon and some 50m were covered in 50 minutes in "blind mode", with slip-check from time to time. After that, it was commanded in "autonav mode" (field D*) for almost three hours (!), covering the remaining 80+ meters in that autonomous mode.

"Hats off" to the rover drivers.

What do you mean? Either it's "autonomous mode" or "hats off to the rover drivers"

Believe me, even when you let autonav kick in some homework needs to be done. And sometimes (most of the time) it is even more frightening. Sort of like letting your teenager son drive your car for the first time. ;-)

Paolo

Somehow I think I'd rather have my teenage daughter drive my car on Mars then on the roads here in Thailand

But my compliments with this great drive and fast pace! I was starting to lose a bit of hope after those RF wheel delays, but this is very good. Once she is past Porcupine the terrain should start to improve quickly and you can release the brake and just let her roll downslope the rest of the way

Time for a new thread: Stuck near Porcupine

I was looking for it too. It's vaguely visible in the sol 1860 and 1863 navcams as a dark, smoothish area. Here's a 3:1 vertical stretch mosaic. Porcupine occupies the top third and mostly the right two frames. Please don't laugh too hard at the workmanship - I don't do mosaics!
Click to view attachment

it is interesting, did Oppy take a photo while she was going across this bedrock?

That was during sol 1864 and I can see no "mid-drive" imaging sequence planned on purpose for that sol.
BUT, there may be a few navcam pictures taken by the autonav software on that portion of the drive. They may eventually be downlinked.

Here's the following chapter...
Click to view attachment

Well, after an "unscheduled stop" it's time to start again.
Tosol (1871) drive moved us around 50m due south.

I have a question. For most of this mission Opportunity's stereo imagery has been recorded with either the "red" filter stereo pair (L2R2) or the "blue" filter stereo pair (L7R1). A while back Opportunity started recording L6R1 stereo pairs for images where I would have expected to see L7R1 pairs. The L7R1 pair is still being used to image the color target and certain close-ups of the ground.

I understand that the difference between the L7 (440 nm. wavelength) and L6 (483 nm. wavelength) filters is minor, but I can't imagine why this change was made. Does anyone here have any thoughts about that?

By the way, I noticed this when MidnightMarsBrowser did not generate pancam anaglyphs when I could see that there were pancam stereo pairs available. I like to view anaglyph panoramas in MMB, so I thought I'd mention this simple work-around for anyone else who has been missing Opportunity's pancam anaglyphs. AFAIK, MMB versions 2.x do not allow one to specify which filters to use for generating anaglyphs, but earlier versions (i.e, ver. 1.5) do. I simply run the earlier version and instruct it to generate L6R1 anaglyphs. Once they are generated, MMB 2.x is able to use them in its panoramas.

N.B. I can hear Mike saying, "Don't forget to tell them never to run the different versions at the same time, or the image indices will be corrupted."

Nothing, I mean, nothing escapes the inquisitive eyes of UMSF! Unfortunately the terrain in Meridiani does not have much texture when you are around ripples. As a result the ground based stereo correlation algorithm has only a handful of features to latch on and therefore our pancams have very little 3D data points. As you have probably observed the blue stereo (L7R1) images are much sharper than the red (L2R2) and my hope was that using blue stereo we would be getting much better results but alas that did not happen. Red stereo instead has blurrier images but has larger contrast: you can differentiate much better between rocks and soil, and banding on the ripples. So a few weeks ago I started asking for L6R1 with the hope that this would be a good compromise between the two. It sort of gets slightly better results, the difference is not dramatic but noticeable. Since my initial request it has become the default for drive direction pancams.

Hope this helps.

Paolo

Yeah; unfortunately MMB 2.0 was never really finished, and probably never will be. In this case, though, it would only take me a few minutes to patch the program to do L6R1 anaglyphs, so I will probably do that at some point. I hadn't consciously noticed the problem yet.

This isn't the first change in imaging that has slightly 'broken' MMB. The biggest one is probably that, a few months ago, suddenly multiple versions of images with dropouts started getting pushed out; you now see multiple versions of the same image ending in "M1," "M2," "M3," etc., with the last one being the (usually) complete version. Since before a few months ago images were always replaced rather than copied, MMB was never programmed to handle this; so for panoramas it always takes the first one, which is always the one with the most dropouts. D'oh! Fortunately you can work around this manually; and maybe someday I'll have time to fix that one, too. But anyway, we noticed that one too, Paolo

> ... Fortunately you can work around this manually ...

I can easily think of an unix script to do it through the whole directory tree, but in windows... Any help?

I mean in the program itself, you can select which images are displayed in panoramas. In the images list window, just uncheck the "M1" version of the image and check the "M3" version instead, for example. Only problem is this change doesn't "stick" after the program quits or after you change the image parameters. Like I said, it's a workaround for a basic problem I don't have time to fix.

I suppose one could do some sort of script like you suggest, but automated file deletion sounds a bit dangerous to me.

Well I hadn't noticed the L6R1's myself. But I had noticed that we have started to get some R2's to go with the R1's again. So I can do some more colour drive direction mosaics:

1870



1871


James

An extract from the latest status report in the MER page: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/sta...ll.html#sol1866

The Sol 1871 drive showed a return of the increase in the amount of current drawn by drive actuator in the right-front wheel. The project is considering mitigation practices of resting the actuator and/or driving backwards for a while.

It would be interesting to hear more about current thinking regarding strategies to reduce the amperage that motor is demanding. Early in the missions, driving in reverse proved to be an effective mitigation method for one of Spirit's ailing wheel's internal friction. Recently, one of Opportunity's front wheel's was able to eliminate friction by standing still for a while.

If both of those options are equally favored, I'd choose the one that continues to make forward progress, as long as the current draw did not increase.