All this time and Oppy-prints in the dust still Get me.

As usual Phil : you did a GREAT image !
...And this endless sea of dunes is very impressive.
Thanks to you, we now feel being really in the middle of nowhere !
5 wheels to you (to help you going to Endeavour...)

Yeah, and only one dune ridge away from your previous best guess - nice job.

Phil's polar projection also shows really nicely how precise this drive was - you can just make out SI at the far end of the tracks, then a beautifully straight drive ending right beside Mackinac.

I played with Hugin to make this vertical projection :

I usually have to use the navcam mosaics in polar projection to adjust/correct the inaccuracy on the tracking data when plotting a position in the route map; sometimes it's not needed. This was the latter case.

sgendreau, I think you speak for all of us!

Everyone... say hello to "Mackinac"... be nice, he's new here...

Click to view attachment

Yes Stu, we will be very nice with him

My takes


Anaglyph :

Yeah, Mackinac, we won't bite - we wouldn't want to risk our RAT on solid iron!

My take on Mackinac in L7/R1 stereo:
Click to view attachment

Stu's right. We wouldn't want to frighten little Mackinac. Perhaps best we just move along and not disturb the wee cobble. Sssh, quietly now....

Maybe it is we who should flee, before the Mackinac Monster frees itself from its sandy tomb!
Click to view attachment

As long as we're out of here by Halloween, I believe we'll be OK. Still, it would be safer to not even use the brush on this guy. Let sleeping dogs lie.

(Btw, nice footwear on that Mackinac monster!)

He's the Mac Daddy of monsters.
Click to view attachment

Those monsters rock!

Yeah! The idea of a hidden creature was enough for our intrepit explorer.
Opportunity left the vicinity of Mackinac and moved 70 meters SW thisol (2038).

Wow, that was quick! I guess they decided it was similar enough to S/BI that no IDD work was needed.

So, back on the road again. Next stop, fresh crater?

> Next stop, fresh crater?

I like the idea.
It's about 250m on this same SW heading until we get to a mostly southwards patch of outcrop --we might be there for the following weekend-- and then another 850m 'til the fresh crater.

Just... well, see for yourselves...

Click to view attachment

We really need an icon for "Shakes head in wonder at the amazing natural beauty of Mars"...

... and a 3D view...

http://twitpic.com/m4jg1

...love how you can see the dust piled up inside the eroded shell of the meteorite, just beautiful...

Beautiful indeed! I'm glad they managed to circumnavigate Mackinac before driving away.

From our new western perspective we can see the beacon again, some 4.5 km away, if anyone's keeping track:
Click to view attachment

(crosseye/3pic) http://www.greuti.ch/oppy/meteorites/mackinac1.htm

Mackinac from two point of views. Realy a surprising rock



Stuning anaglyph Stu

Thanks Ant

A look-back at Mackinac here...

http://twitpic.com/m56kr

You're all going to laugh at me - no change there then, haha! - but I found making these images of Mackinac quite moving. We were the first people to see this meteorite... ever... and it was like a piece of martian modern art, some kind of abstract sculpture... Looking at it it reminded me of one of those space art paintings showing the rusted, ruined hulk of a crashed starship sitting on a planet's surface, long since abandoned by its crew and left to the mercy of the elements. I know, it's just a hunka metal, but how many aeons did it take Mars' dust-laden, hissing wind to turn it into this beautiful, beautiful cosmic carcass? At times like this, when we see something like this, I'm left in awe of the sheer beauty of Mars.

Bye little guy, take care... the next people to see you will probably be native martians, sent out into the Meridiani desert to collect up all the meteorites Opportunity found and bring them back to the Museum of Mars, where they'll be put on display for everyone to see, alongside ancient spaceprobes, famous rocks, and the flag planted in the dirt by the first manned expedition.

Oppy got an APOD

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap091019.html for Nereus

edit: is there a remove foot from mouth edit function.

Something tells mars loon will not approve that...
Good work Ken!

From a Northern perspective, 4.5 kms is the distance we were on sol ~400 about 1.5 km south of Endurance.
Beacon was not visible by then, I mean we didn't see it at this time

Yeah, that's a good point. Our first glimpse of the Beacon was on sol 775, when we were only about 1.8 km from the Beacon. The topography is definitely working to our advantage from the south.

At the bottom of the image:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...NLP2572L5M1.JPG
Are those chips from Mackinac?

Really not much of a beacon from this vantage point. If we had originally approached Victoria from the south, I expect it would have been named the Lump, or some such thing.

Almost certainly...

Click to view attachment

I think Mackinac is my new favorite meteorite of all time; incredible imagery, all!!!

Great eyes, Rui, & thanks for the illuminating close-up, Stu. Hmm...weathering & possibly transport (via covering & uncovering of aeolian deposits?) of fairly hefty hunks of iron. Mac has been there quite awhile indeed!

I suspect those are chips from Machinac.

But how did they get so far away from the meteorite? Certainly the wind did not blow them there. They are too big. Some sort of weathering is involved here but it cannot be just wind. That leaves the possibility of water or ice. Or they might have fell off immediate upon impact; but that would mean a somewhat or relatively soft landing for them to be that close. If wind is responsible, then it must have been a lot stronger than today - and I cannot imagine that without more evidence to suggest the extreme difference that would be necessary.

Just do a random walk of 1 mm/year for a billion years and moving a meter doesn't seem too difficult.

On what basis do you make this claim.

Almost everything we see at Meridiani is the result of what the wind has been doing, given several billion years to do it.

Wind combined with the tiny tap of dust bouncing along the ground in high wind speeds would, over time, move small metal pieces like that. Why wouldn't it.

The pieces are far too big. Physics tells us that it is impossible to move them given the wind forces on Mars Today. They would have to have been far stronger in the past. A millimeter a year is highly unlikely given the size of those pieces. If they were a tenth the size, then maybe.

The wind does make small changes but we are talking about much smaller scales that add up after millions and perhaps billions of years time. Moving grain size or smaller particles on Mars is a lot different than whole pieces that are several inches long and not round. Thinking that such large pieces are going move like that stretches the bounds of credibility. On Mars, a millimeter per year for such a sized piece might as well be a mile.

Something moved them, but not the current wind patterns. I made some credible suggestions. Here is another. A blast from a different impact would probably make a huge difference; but there is evidence of many around here. Multiple blast would likely move them a lot farther than they appear to have traveled. You would then have to explain how these pieces remain within a meter of the source meteorite. But now we are assuming the source. We don't know that for sure.

You seem to forget that these pieces are sitting on dust/sand/blueberries which clearly move as seen on time frames of only a week by the rovers in the dust storms. Why with the grains of sand under them moving around does it seem impossible to imagine them moving a mm in a year? If the wind blows the grains under them out, they will eventually topple and slide a bit. Do this ever year for a billion years and you can move quite a distance. Also, think of large (>1000 kg) erratic boulders on earth that move hundred of feet. By your arguments, nothing bigger 1 kg should ever move on a planet surface.

Maybe in a billion years they are quantum tunneling from one place to the next

Really?

Where?

We've seen rover tracks nearly vanish overnight.

We've seen blueberries re-excavated after being burried by rover wheels within a year.

You underestimate what the wind, and time, can do.

Or the piece(s) might broken off finally from Mackinac shortly before they landed - after the hot ride through the atmosphere. Quasi a mini scatter field here

New 'astro-poem' celebrating Mackinac...

http://twitpic.com/m8m22/full

Poetry dude, I've told this in another place...don't take it wrong but...cancer?!
Sorry but that word didn't gave a good feeling...poor Mackinac...

EDITED: Just read your answer in the other place Stu...

Oh. So gravity afterward is going to move them horizontally a whole meter when they topple. I don't think so. This sounds a whole lot like the pedestal theory when there clearly was not one at BI. If such toppling over billions of years was so significant, why aren't there any pedestals underneath any of the pieces of meteorites?

How can you say I forgot the movement of the sand grains and blueberries when I referred to the movement in my post?

Well, I can't write about faeries riding on the backs of unicorns, bunnies hopping through enchanted forests, glorious sunrises, twin Barsoomian moonsets and marmalade skies all the time, even I need a change now and again :-)

No, seriously tho, that word just came to me when I realised how eaten away the meteorite appears, as if it's been devoured from inside. Seemed appropriate and accurate. That meteorite does look very, very ill to me. But hey, it's just some scribblings after all.

Some seem to be forgetting that a meteorite the size of Mackinac should have left a sizable dent on the plain when it hit. So it probably did not land on the current surface. And all of these various meteorites are on the surface of the, except SI which was partially buried in a dune.

It still was on top of the hard surface below (my assumption but a good guess). The loose material starting to bury SI suggests predominant deposition rather than excavation. And remember there are no pedestals to indicate excavation.

Does anyone know have many vertical meters have been deflated at Meridiani?

I went and actually measured the size of the piece in question. It's just under 4 cm across (about 1.5 inches).

I don't see a problem with such a piece being moved by wind/saltation over geological timescales. To move a metre in a billion years means moving on average a nanometre a year. That's a millionth of a millimetre a year, or something like 1/100 000 times a human hair width per year. Isn't wind/saltation supposed to have an important impact on rocks on Mars generally, moving them around over geological times?

But I'm sure there are many other possibilities as well. Shouldn't any fragments broken off on impact fall in a range of distances from the main piece (Mackinac), including some very close? Maybe some earlier surface that the meteorites sat on was more steeply sloped, so gravity could assist in moving small pieces around?

Looks greenish in that picture... I suppose that's just contrast with the red soil?

The dunes of Meridiani come and go, don't they? Over time, I mean. That being the case, perhaps a dune rose beneath Mackinac at some point, and as the dune then eroded away there was a separation of some fragments from the meteorite, that fell away from the main body. Now Mackinac is on flat ground there's a gap between it and the fragments.

Important to remember how sloooooowly things move on Mars, and over how long a time they do that moving. It's easy to think in human terms when considering time. We really can't imagine something happening "over billions of years".

New images are in...where are we?
Halfway between Oppy's previous position and the small crater due south or did she keep on roving SW?
Tesheiner?...

Quakes from nearby impacts.

I'm pretty sure I've found us. Extrapolate from 2038 to 2040, continuing in the same direction and same distance, to the 2041 location:
Click to view attachment
We've got some pretty sizable dunes close to our south now. I would guess that the next drive would be to the WSW to get onto the bedrock again and then thread between more large dunes ahead.

Of course this position isn't official until we hear from The Master!