Perhaps it's now time to start a new topic: Oppy has hit the road again! Here's the view looking back from sol 2122:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...1SP1211R0M1.JPG
And the view forward, towards Fresh Crater, our next destination?
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...1SP2355R1M1.JPG

Guess that answers my question! (We posted at the same time, Fred!)

Guess we're going thissaway, then...

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It looks like a relatively short drive to the southeast, presumably to get onto the pavement that's now immediately to our south. But we must wait to hear from our resident expert mapmaker...

And the drive direction pancams are looking more to the SSE than the south, where "fresh crater" is. So who knows what the plan is, or even if there is a plan yet...

Aaaah, is there anything more beautiful than fresh tracks heading off into the Martian distance? I know there was good science there, but I was still going through roving withdrawal. Let's hope Fresh Crater is a really boring place.

Brian

Interesting outcrop... thingy... Oppy drove to yestersol...

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I'm on a business travel this week. Let's see if I can find some time to work with the maps...

I think the rover team will be dismayed for someone to suggest there is no drive plan......

Just d*mn. I'd say that is ancient degraded ejecta of some kind rather than any native "outcrop."

She swung around the north side of Marquette Island, and is now just to the east and slightly south of that fascinating rock, sort of in the next "drift trough" over. I imagine the next drive will be longer.

You're right Dan, that's a fascinating object...

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That does look interesting.

Kind of a mess, but here's where we are as of sol 2122:

Just for fun, a comparison of "Fresh Crater" with an old friend, using same-scale crops from the same HiRISE image...

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And a 2x crop of "Fresh Crater"... looks like some big rocks in and around it, and some nice internal structure too...

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More pix at: http://roadtoendeavour.wordpress.com/2010/...ell-marquette-2

I like it - putting in jpegs from different days etc!!! Great context.

Hmm...too many dunes for my taste...let's just ignore it and keep on the asphalt...

A very rough reprojection of a pan from the last end-of-drive position:

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And its approximate location (base from Google's Mars)

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(I've replaced this image with an improved one, the arrow moved SW a bit)

Phil

Today's view of "Fresh Crater"...

http://twitpic.com/xytme/full

After the new drive on sol 2123, "fresh crater" is more centred in our sights:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...9PP2357R1M1.JPG
But there are some sizable dunes directly between us and that crater.

It looks like the 2123 drive was SE again, but I think we may be farther than Phil indicated on his map, since that's one huge expanse of bedrock to our immediate south now.

As has been noted, the current surface of Meridiani that Oppy is driving over has some fairly large irregularities in the surface of the Sulfate-salt sandstone pavement. What could cause this difference? What differences in the compositional structure and/or erosional pattern would yield this difference?
Oppy is climbing towards a ridge (or emerging from a broad depression) that is near the location of Fresh Crater, hence the nearby horizon). Better sight lines towards Endeavour Crater may await us.
I am antsy with anticipation to see if some of the fragments littering the ground around Fresh Crater show the signature of Olivine...

Right, fredk, I was having a bit of trouble locating that outcrop.

EDIT - I have replaced my previous image with a better one, not wanting to keep multiple versions on here. This was a position I considered earlier but couldn't quite see how it fitted. Now I think it could be OK.

Phil

As MarkG notes above, 'Fresh Crater' is almost silhouetted against the horizon; IIRC the terrain mostly slopes to the SE. We never quite got the anticipated "hell of a view" moment on the post-Purgatory road to Victoria; is there any hope of one when we get up there?

If I recall earlier discussions correctly I think the answer was yes, there or thereabouts is the top of the rise.

This is very interesting to me, too. I can't wait to see the view from the top of this rise. Has anyone here crunched any numbers of pummelled any pixels to come up with a prediction of what we might actually see? (Part of me doesn't want to know in advance, to be honest, it'll be a great surprise, just like the first view of Victoria Crater opening up... that was a heck of a day, wasn't it? )

Hard to say what might come into view but there was this discussion in the previous thread:
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=148557

And in particular from Tim in post 423: http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=148568

Finally, some good pic to process !!

So, drive direction on Sol 2122, navcam and R1/R2 pancam :



And Sol 2123 :

If some of the sulfate has been somehow reduced to sulfide, it might produce the greyish discoloration and changes in the erosion pattern.

Nice! "Fresh Crater" seems to be on a local high area, so we can hope for a more expansive view when we get to the top of it.

Phil

Getting closer...

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The sol 2124 drive seems to have crossed the open stretch of pavement that was to our south pre-drive. Notice our tracks leading from Marquette Island near the left side horizon in this navcam frame:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...23P1957R0M1.JPG

We're now sitting close to a dark "gravelly" patch that's been visible in our front windshield for some time:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...23P1957R0M1.JPG

This drive crossed the 19km mark too.

may have been noted before but Fresh Crater has a name

@MarsRovers Oppy is making tracks toward a fresh impact crater named Conception, a pit stop on the longer drive to Endeavor Crater.

Thanks for pointing that, Jay.
It's the first mention, AFAIK.

Perhaps too soon to declare a trend, but the couple of drives since MI are shorter than before. Local terrain limitations, or part of an ongoing strategy to try and keep the wheel problems from reappearing?

Brian

One of Magellan's ships.

Farewell view of "Marquette Island" (I think?) (dark rock, top left)

http://twitpic.com/y6ovw/full

Sol 2124 navcam pan

Nice one! Here it is reprojected into a vaguely map-like geometry.

Phil

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... and slightly closer...

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"The casualties suffered in the Philippines left the expedition with too few men to sail all three of the remaining ships. Consequently, on May 2 they abandoned Concepción and burned the ship." I hope Oppy has no pyromaniac instincts and leave leave the place way before May 2...hell! On May 2 I hope to at Endeavour watching the views with a nice cold beer on my hand...

230m to go.

Been busy - away for work - and good to come back and see that Oppy is moving again......and also all the good pics! Here's a quick stitch/colourization of Nav Cam pics on Sol 2126 (Sat 16 Jan 2010). The tracks move onwards zig zagging through the dunes..... love it!

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Sol 2125 drive direction in color. The rocks of Fresh Crater are very clear now Tens of Marquette-like rocks ?

Most of those rocks are most likely blasted-out chunks of the Meridiani substrate. However, if a few shards are Marquette-Island-like, that would be very interesting...

Hope for a cleaning blast on the Mini-TES...

... and on the solar panels too. The power levels are not that low as for Spirit but these 336Wh worry me a little bit.

Just managed to grab a few minutes of 'Mars time' (a rare thing these days!) to process the recent R21 drive direction mosaics.

All four images link to the same blog entry.

2114


2122


2124


2125


Looking forward to getting a good look at Conception Crater, should be spectacular with all that shattered Meridiani pavement.

James

Yeah, the dust factor is around 25% below the values one Martian year ago. But the tau is better, around 0.5 versus 0.7 or 0.75. That means the sky is quite dark, as you can see in views like this:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...1SP2355R2M1.JPG
Of course that's an IR view, and the sky is much brighter in the visible. Still, it gets very tricky to capture the sky's hue at times like this based on the stretched jpegs, especially when you're limited to R1/2/6, as you can see with the blue sky tints in James' pans. In reality the sky should still be orangy.

Quick one of 3 pancams sets Sol 2127 (Sun Jan 17 2010)

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Another drive on sol 2128. Conception/Fresh Crater looming ever larger:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...EXP2361R1M1.JPG

Some interesting detail becoming visible now...

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So let's see... we stayed how long at Marquette Island? Multiply that by a couple of dozen..?

Since MI doesn't belong to this place, I've got a different Conception of the situation

That's not all that looms larger. Pardon stupid newbie question: how big ARE those dunes? Looking at the HiRISE photo, I don't see an obvious route to the crater -- or away, either -- that doesn't require crossing a lot of them.