Here's the navcam mosaic taken after today's 35m drive.
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Here is a image I thought was pretty nice.
Opportunity took this an hour and 23 minutes before local sunset on Sol 2330
I adjusted the contrast ...
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That lovely shot put this tune in my head
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfoLMa8bET4

Here's the navcam mosaic from sol 2334 and looking at Scott Maxwell's tweet I guess we are heading to the dark feature (cobble field?) at the middle of the picture.

> Our drive-extension trick continues performing well: an extra 11m yestersol. Nextersol's target is only 50m away, so no extension this time.

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Here is the end of drive image on Sol 2334 (today Aug 18, 2010) from the backward looking hazcam (the front of our rover driving in reverse). It didn't look promising but a little 'rinse cycle' pulls a lot of hidden information out of the image.
Local sunset is an hour and 15 minutes away, and the sun flare near the horizon kills the contrast in the original.
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...what a journey!

Here's today's navcam mosaic. Back on solid rock.
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Solid, and more than a little mussed-up...

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That is interesting. (Great anaglyph, Stu!) Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think we've seen such pronounced "micro-duning" around the paving stones anywhere else before now.

Makes me wonder if this is a comparatively windy little area due to local topography somehow as we approach the crater. That's an unfounded WAG, of course...but this looks a little different than the norm.

This does look like an interesting place...

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And a 3D self-portrait... kind of... ish...

http://twitpic.com/2gi9uy

I have the feeling we will stop here for more than the weekend...
And perhaps it may be time to open a new thread; the "start of the drive east" was a quite time ago. Let's wait and see.

Edit: forgot to say, this place (see Stu's pic. above) has been named "Cambridge Bay".

Since we have left Victoria Crater. How many Scientific Stops have we made???

I know we are over due for one again and we might do one at our current location?

And again Bobby - that's a question you could easily answer yourself just looking at Eduardo's maps. There's nowhere that has that answer, someone will have to work it out, and you just volunteered

http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/mission/status_...ll.html#sol2314

The plan apparently is to routinely do Science stops every kilometer or so. Of course, there may be extra ones where there is special scientific interest.

Since Doug's driving now, he deserves to get a place named for him

Cambridge....pah...never lived there. UMSF's high altitude balloon payload did launch from there though.

From what I gather, we should be very wary if we encounter a site named "Milton Keynes"...

Actually, what is the naming convention right now? Are we sure if this refers to Cambridge, UK or Cambridge, MA, or neither?

Since it's Cambridge Bay, it can only refer to the settlement on Victoria Island, Nunavut (a Canadian province). (Some info here)
The theme seems to be Arctic exploration so far, along with Pond Inlet before.

Oppy looked down at the pavement of Cambridge Bay today and saw this:
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The colors are more 'adjusted' as they are approximate ... (oh well)
Any one of these look down images could have been a whole mission for other probes (Beagle, Mars3, Polar Explorer, and others). We will never be at this place again for a long long time. So, Oppy, look down sometimes at the end the day and show us where you are and what you see. A small and unique corner of Mars. We will figure it all out later.

I wonder if there are any of those wavy features ( I forget what the word was, something with an 'F' ) they were so fascinated by in Eagle Crater.

We can see from Tesheiner's route map (especially the kml version) that Opportunity is now parked directly west of a NE/SW-trending linear feature visible in the Hirise imagery. It seems to be one of several in the area that appear to break up the bedrock surface into a number of polygonal blocks. The linear feature in front of Oppy appears as a small escarpment or step in the bedrock. You can see it in Eduardo's recent navcam panorama, but it is very apparent in the navcam anaglyphs from sol 2235 like the one below which was automatically generated by Midnight Mars Browser.
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Stu's and PDP8's recent color pancams fall near the center of this navcam.


Alan: The f-word you are thinking of is "festoons."

And notice the interesting weathering along the fracture just above center on this composite.

--Bill

I guess we might be here for a short while.

Looks nice in colour...

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How about,
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Comparison of Sol 2335 view with 2336...

I hope Nautilus and Capt. Anderson will feature in the naming series dedicated to Arctic Exploration.

Thanks for putting that together for us, Bill. False color doesn't lie. It looks as if a bunch of MIs should be coming down tosol. Surely they will image that zone of alteration.

She's still struggling to make contact with the relay satellite and has made a LOT of partial transmissions. But there have been a couple of images to make it down down:

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...OYP2936M2M8.JPG

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...OYP2936M2MC.JPG

They're adjacent images, although not in the sharpest focus.


My initial impression? Tufa. Look at the porous, fiberous nature of the layered stuff.

We'll just need to be patient.

--Bill



EDIT-- pieced together a quick mosaic of those two images:

The latest oppy status update from http://marsrovers.nasa.gov .

The rover has done an MI and APXS of 2 targets; "Clarin Beach" and "Duero Beach".
The odd partial repeat pictures from sol 2239 are I think due to a routine test of the Mars Express relay they did.

I would look up some details of those beach names but it's 3 AM and I'm out of beer. Hope you understand.

Brian

Clarin and Duero beaches are nice white sand beaches in the Philippenes. That's all I can come up with.

Brian


Edit: Clarin and Duero beaches are on Bohol Island - one of the first places visited by the Magellan expedition. History says they did not recieve a friendly welcome and the ship Concepcion was burned here.

Still struggling with the relay satellite, but at least we have MI mosaics for three spots at the Cambridge site. The exact coverage may change as we get more MIs, but these locations are reasonably close.

--Bill

Bill - you're jumping to a false conclusion in saying the UHF relay is being problematic right now. There have always been dropouts, there will always be dropouts. I think you're seing multiple consecutive versions of the same image, and thinking it's a swathe of images with different drop outs.

here - http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...nity_m2340.html - for example - one could be forgiven that it was a sequence of 30 MI images, most with dropouts.

It's actually ( if you check the time stamp of the images ) many many iterated versions of only 4 actual images taken.

Thanks for making that index map, Bill.

I've taken the available MIs and assembled them with Autostitch. On sol 2340 the target named Clarin Beach was imaged. It is the bottom target in Bill's map.
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On sol 2341 the target named Duero Beach was imaged with the microscopic imager. This is the top target in Bill's map. Some partial faces, edges, and corners of cubic crystals of a mineral (perhaps halite?) are visible in this rock. They are most apparent near the center of this mosaic.
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edit: Please note that MIs normally appear upside down compared to the same area imaged by pancams, navcams, and hazcams. These images will need to be rotated 180 degrees to match the orientation of Bill's pancam image.

Very good, Tom. Your four image mosiac of Clarin Beach is the same area as my quick initial mosaic of the two images in Post#377.

The upper target, Duero Beach, is interesting. My initial impression was "vuggy", but you're right-- it's more coarsely crystalline. I hope that they image the resistant ledge just above Clarin, too.

Interesting area, interesting changes. We've dropped a few meters in elevation and appear to be going down in-section. Nice changes seen on the Hirise images ahead...

Something I do as a matter of course, which might be a little confusing, is to invert the rover's MIs from their native "inverted view" so that their orientation matches that of the Nav-, Haz- and PanCams.

--Bill

I, too, saw what looked like the narrow voids they called vugs in the rocks from Eagle Crater. This is an interesting site with rather dramatic changes in the rock over relatively short distances across that "fracture zone." The latest MIs to come down image a curiously porous rock; one of the more porous Meridiani rocks we have seen.

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...OYP2956M2M1.JPG

To me, it looks like secondary porosity...porosity formed by the selective removal/dissolution of preexisting material. I hope we see that resistant ledge next.

While Oppy continues to gaze at the ground, I thought it'd be nice to look around.
One of her many postcards from Mars. Sol 2333
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"Vuggy" was the first word that came to mind, but yes, "curiously porous" does describe better. As you note, similar to the outcrop in Eagle Crater.

I've been keeping track of the guesstimated elevation of the traverse, and at this point we are at approximately the elevation of Eagle Crater. And we've just come down from areas with the finely-bedded rocks and the sandstone-sans-blueberries, so the stratigraphy is matching up, if you assume "essentially flat-lying" on the geo-chron (or -whatever), which is not unreasonable. I'm looking forward to the results of the "APX-scratchplate"...

What is exciting is that now we are headed downhill (topographically) and also down section-wise which means we are headed into zones new and not seen before. We have 80 meters of elevation to the bottom of the slope and perhaps that much in section to look at. Looking ahead at the HiRise we can see some profound changes in the overall appearance of the bedrock underfoot.

--Bill

Sorry, Astro0, I couldn't resist the temptation...

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The Train = Rabbit
Opportunity = The Turtle

Opportunity Wins This Race

The train to Endeavour is coming! With stops at Cambridge Bay and Santa Maria.

The "science stop" has just finished so I think it's time to continue with a new thread: From Cambridge Bay to the "parking lot". However, discussions and/or pictures about Cambridge Bay should still be posted on this one.

LOL @ Egon! Haha, nice train! =)

Yes, from the recent Rover update from the PS, it looks like the MER Team finds it as interesting as we have:


And they have been making stops looking for facies changes before we drop onto the new part of the section.

As I said, this is getting to be exciting...

--Bill



PS-- a new L257 of a weathering zone at Cambridge, Sol 2336 (added 5 Sept)

I was wondering if someone would post the whole mosaic of Cambridge Bay here and just found that Horton did that on the "other forum". It's a 6x1 L257 pancam mosaic.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hortonheardawho/4968004842/

I was just working on it.





Both images link to the same page.

James

A whole bunch of posts moved to the Cambridge Bay to Parking Lot thread.

REMINDER: Unless your post pertains to the drive from the START OF THE TURN EAST and then UP TO THE STOP AT CAMBRIDGE BAY, then you should be posting in the Bay to Parking Lot thread.