I like it (the panorama).

Looks like a bunch of Pancam images from around the heatshield just came down. I'm still downloading them (network is slow today)... ooh, there's a nice one back towards the heatshield from a long way away (pancam not navcam...). Edit: Bummer, only L7R1... well I bet the rest will follow later, and then this will be a very nice color 2x1.

Another very long drive by the look of it

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...00P1617L0M1.JPG

Argo is history already
They seem to have taken a left turn (eastward). I thought the next target craters were straight to the south. Maybe they 're going to check point #2 in the crater_hoping_image posted above in this thread ?

It certainly looks like there has been a change of plans. The crater-hopping map was included in the January 20th mission manager report, so the changes must have been made in the last week.

My guess is that they are heading straight for Vostok now. The intermediate targets in the original plan weren't all that interesting anyway. With the long drives they are achieving, we could get to Vostok in short order.

The bumps on the horizon seem to be getting more noticeable. I'm guesing this picture is to the south again.

Personally, I don't see what makes 'Vostok' so interesting... To me it looks like a very shallow crater with a dust covered rim, similar to 'Eagle' crater.
I'd say go straight to the etched terrain and examine a few cobbles/meteors and dunes during the weekends.

Well - thats the thing - we can get to Vostok in fairly short otder and then see what it's all about. It looks larger than Eagle by about 50% - and might be easily accesable. We'll be there in two weeks at this rate.

Doug

I'm not sure either, but as I first noted back on page 1 of this thread, Squyres is quite interested in seeing it, and said in the TPS radio interview he had doubts as to whether it is a normal crater. I don't know what he is basing that on exactly, but I'm more intrigued to see it also now of course. I haven't heard anyone's ideas yet on what else Vostok might be, or if "just" a crater, what makes it unusual to Squyres?

Well Squyres seems to have final say on everything it looks like.

I wonder if he lets anyone else have input for targets?

That's a little harsh. To be fair - he IS the principle investigator. He lead the development of the instrumentation on this thing - the buck stops with him. But it's not right to say that just because two people here disagree with what he wants to look at, then he must have the final say on everything. It's quite likely that many members of the science team want to see Vostok. It'll be interesting to characterise it simply as another ground-truth for MOC imagery if nothing else. It looks odd - it isnt neat and round, it has a fragmented rim - and it's 1km south of the main sites of investigation and given that Meridiani is on a gentle down slope heading south ( 2 deg I believe ) - then it may be strata we've not seen before. And one has to break up periods of long driving with periods of scientific investigation if for no other reason than to maximise the data volume sent back (fill flash, then drive for 6 days and downlink it all- repeat )

Doug

I wouldnt mind taking a look at the very dark area in the image below, it looks similar to the heatshield impact site, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a recent meteorite impact. Vostock is bottom left in the image. It looks crater like simply because it's circular, but if it's not, what could it be?

edit: The attached image is a crop from this one at MSSS

http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/r10_r15/im...5/R1502302.html
http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/r10_r15/im...5/R1500822.html

http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/r10_r15/im...4/R1400021.html

In the Crater-hopping image. Vostok is titled as "Mesa/Buried Crater". Could be something they see in 3d images of the area.

I got all happy when it appeared that Oppy had driven into one of the craters it was headed for and it had bedrock!

Then I saw the images of the lander and the airbags and I noticed the filenames were much earlier than the current images...

Guess Oppy was just cleaning out the flash memory.

Doh!

Eric P / MizarKey

I thought we had arrived at Vostok for second! I was just going to send out a warning for people not to freak out; the crater images are from Sol 24. Strange.
P.S. There also appears to be a healthy dose of pancam images from Sol 333, 334, and 363. Must have been a good Odyssey pass.

But why are they turning in that direction?
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...03P1214R0M1.JPG

Going by what others have said, I'd say it's probably just to improve communications with Odyssey (?).

Yup - Odyssey will go roughtly North South, so if the rover is facing North South then the PMA and LGA could easily obstruct the UHF antenna.

Turning 90 degrees in place and there's less obsctruction and infact, you can turn during the pass to make it even better.

Doug

Rim of Victoria and the outcropping of Vostok??

Doug

What driving strategy are they using to get to Vostock and the Etched terraine? One similar to that used in Spirit's drive to the COlumbia HIlls - several days driving then stop and do some IDD work?

I think it's a technical term known as "FLOOR IT"

They've got a few science targets on the way - so there's going to be science-data-rich sols for a few sols at a time, then thin days on a long week of driving.

These long driving days are good because they give a great chance to REALLY dump out the flash ( images from 12 months ago getting dumped out at the moment) - because you get nice long drives with not THAT much science data going on. You can also turn-in-place to optimise UHF passes without any trouble and thus get really good downlink volumes.

I think they're emtying flash RIGHT out ready for a big colour pan at Vostok so they can take it in, say, two sols ( instead of the 4, 5, 8, 10 odd sols that some pans have taken ) and then get moving again if there's nothing interesting, and spend the next week or so downlinking it while they're covering ground.

On a good day - they could get 250Mbits down in a couple of Odyssey passes. At 4:1 compression - thats 600 odd pancam frames. (bear in mind however, that a 4 filter panorama required 264 frames and a lot of housekeeping data, and Pancam is only one of 5 instruments onboard

Doug

Doug, I doubt those bumps on the horizon are vostok or victoria. The view is looking across the ripples in the sand. Opportunity has been travelling roughly parallel to the ripples as can be seen in this view back toward the heat shield.
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...00P1310R0M1.JPG
The bumps are probably a group of craters to the west. I think vostok is on the right side of this image
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...03P2366L7M1.JPG

Who know

There is a crater or a couple of 'medium' sized ( eagle<crater<endurance ) craters out east - so you may well be right

Doug

.....it also looks like they haven't used the afternoon Odyssey pass the past few sols too.

They seem to have stalled LOL


http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...13P1310R0M1.JPG

Oppy will probably investigate this rock/piece of outcrop/whatever:

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...13P1210R0M1.JPG

latest update:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/sta...tml#opportunity

Had a few comms and driving glitches the past week, so I guess they are not as far south as they hoped to be.

Considering that they passed Argo on Sol 361, they have actually traveled quite a bit...



Disclaimer: The map above is pure speculation at this point. Any similarities to actual rover maps is purely coincidental

245m on sol 362 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ?????

Holy crap !!!!!!! lol You're right they have travelled quite a bit lol

No actually I think I misread this:



They probably meant 90 meters, then continued on *for another 66.55 meters*, resulting in a *total of* 156.55-meter traverse.

Anyway, here's a new map including the 156.55-meter traverse... Again, this is pure speculation based on observations on the images. They did pass Argo on 361 though so this can give us some clues.

There appears to be a distant hill peaking over the horizon to the south. Is this Vostok or Victoria?

Finally something to look forward to. ^^

This panorama (Doug, don't laugh, this was a 1-minute jobber ) should give us some bearings on where we are...

Any update on the plans for Opportunity in the sols ahead? We haven't had any new images for a few sols.

It'll have have been trench-mania for the weekend, followed by scuff-obs as well ( you seen the MI images of the berries - it's like someone threw a pot of ballbearings under the 'scope)

After that, I imagine a big push south.

fwiw - I think I can see vostok in the distance, a curved white feature in L2/L4 images





The little horizon features being the rim of Victoria. I'll try and make some sense of the rough edge of victoria and correlate to that image at some point. Busy putting together an MER talk for Wed PM at the moment

Doug

Hmmm, not sure, Doug. Look at the ripples on the ground. The ripples have been mostly running north-south (well, north-northwest to south-southeast to be precise) and Oppy has been traveling in parallel with the ripples. This view shows ripples going left to right and the view cuts across it, so it either looks to the East or West...

Also, from the current location looking South, Vostok should appear right of Victoria, not left.

Based on the angle, I think Alan's post above shows where Victoria might be.

Doug: it looks almost identical to the color enhanced image you posted on Feb 1 (last page of this thread http://mer.rlproject.com/long_001.jpg ) with the light featured crater in the foreground and to the left of the 3 elevated bumps on the horizon. If we knew the distance between drives and the pointing of the camera, we could do some *really* long baseline stereo and figure out how far away these features are if they are, as Pando suggests, to the east and not the south.

whoops, sorry about that Pando...above should have read East

From orbit, images of Eagle Crater show a white "ring", but as Opportunity showed this isn't outcrop, as that only covered about half the crater wall. I beleive wind blown dust made the outside of the walls slightly brighter. Once Opportunity left Eagle and started driving to Endurance, Eagle Crater rapidly dissapeared from view.

Perhaps the white circular feature that is Vostok is not outcrop at all but nothing more than dust accumulating on the rim of an eroded crater - and just like Eagle Crater very hard or impossible to see from a distance.

Whatever it is - they look at it anew every single day with L456. You're right -it's off to one side of track - perhaps the pair of small craters to the west, there's nothing that size/distance to the east except a eagle-like crater the best part of a km away

Doug

Doug, the image was taken due West, and corresponds to the upper right side on the panorama I posted.

So it cannot be either Victoria or Vostok...

It might tie in with two craters west of track on here then
http://moc.rlproject.com/end_vic_2m.jpg

Doug

What is Opportunity doing at the moment, and what are they planning to do? Still no indication of it's progress from new images. They did have some problems last week, I hope everything is ok.

There's a good 3 or 4 days to poke around a trench - then a couple of days to poke around the scuff.

Add in a couple of restricted sols and there's nothing suprising

Doug

True, but even if they're doing IDD work they normally take pics with the hazcams....

We've had much worse gaps in Exploratorium before

and anyway - we got SOME pictures back yesterday
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...cam/2005-02-07/

Doug

We are still at the trench site

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...DIP1918R0M1.JPG

Rotated to IDD on the Scuff mark it would appear. This is important science guys - dont get down about it

Doug

Right... we care about the images, but there's an amazing amount of data that gets sent back that is anything but images. For most of us this is just a boring set of numbers but it's something that will keep the scientists busy for the next decade at least.

The numbers itself are quite boring, but the story they tell is very interesting

That's exactly it. Think of the rovers as raw data collectors, just spewing out numbers. But man, those numbers are valuable

-----
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." -- Pablo Picasso

Still at the trench



Perhaps they've found something unusual.