I was going to point that out too... But I couldn't be bothered ;-)

Whatever.

This is it.

We are now on the early hours of sol 2367 and if I'm reading "the codes" correctly we should be moving closer to the rock later in the day. Expect fresh pictures tomorrow morning (GMT).

Deja vu

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...5CP1923L0M1.JPG

The same rock is visible on the fhazcam, meaning that we are already past it.

Wow... talk about a drive-by shooting!

Guess it wasn't interesting or different enough to warrant a proper look. Fair enough; bigger prizes lay ahead.

Not so fast. Maybe Oppy is trying to get into position for a nice IDD workout. Can't do that approaching it with the rear of the rover. My prediction for the next move: forward with a slight turn to the left.

Hmmm, I don't know... Whateveritis looks a looong way behind Oppy now... would have to be a Dukes of Hazard spin to go back...

I'll have to agree with OWW. The "post-drive" nav/pancams are used to plan the next move and in this case they are pointing right to the rock, whatever it is.

Hey, I won't complain if they do turn back. Although I hide it quite well, I have something of an interest in meteorites...

Getting closer (http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...4FP1921R0M1.JPG)

Which images do you mean - the images that are down or just planned? Maybe the last navcams down are just intended to image Whateveritis from this side, not to plan an approach? Maybe they took three to be sure they caught it? They could use those navcams to plan some pancam closeups before continuing the drive east next sol.

The pancams that are down correspond with the first of the navcam drive-by sequence so they're not post-drive.

Edit: Ah, now I see. Most of the images I was talking about weren't down when people posted the first comments about the drive-by imaging. They imaged the rock from three different viewpoints with navcam as they drove by, and once with pancam from the first of the three viewpoints. That's why it looks to me like they're not stopping to study the rock - they just caught images from what different viewpoints they had as they drove by.

Whateveritis in stereo:
Click to view attachment

Mars Rover Opportunity Approaching Possible Meteorite

Whateveritis has been given a name: "Oileán Ruaidh" (pronounced ay-lan ruah).
That's great! Following my criteria to include the features on the route map it will be: Oileán Ruaidh ("Whateveritis").

...or 'Craggy Island' for short...

Careful, now...

Has anyone been able to figure out which image the press release image corresponds to? The images from sol 2363 have a pretty-much level horizon.

"Red Island"

Phil

Click to view attachment

That is one ugly, chewed-up meteorite.

Okay, now we need a Gaelic speaker to guide us on pronunciation and Ustrax to tell us where the original island is located. (My guess at the pronunciation would be 'Eylan Rua'.) How do they pick the names? This 'island' looks distincly less red than its surroundings. Are they following an itinerary?

EDIT: Stu, can you pan right a bit? I can't quite see it all.

Yes Stu, your pointing is really off, you can do better.

Sorry guys, I'll try to do better!

I'm having trouble pinning down the precise location of "Red Island", but it's one of several islands off the coast of Donegal, NW Ireland. I'll track it down properly tomorrow. In the meantime, some details about the real island here...

http://www.donegalislands.com/island_roy

http://www.donegaldirect.com/ws_business_d...ssNm=Island+Roy

I fear Ol' Red isn't going to win the "Miss Meridiani Meteorite 2010" contest...

Click to view attachment

Here's Oileán Ruaidh (Google, as with many other sources, calls it Island Roy)

Ahhh, thanks Jek; I was paddling around the offshore coast looking for it. Sneaky thing was hiding inland.

If I remember my Gaelic correctly, Oileán Ruaidh should be pronounced like ILL-LAWN ROO-AH. The stroke over the 'a' makes it a long aww sound as in "raw" (same as the name Seán). The 'O' in "Oi' is silent.

Drive by shooting?

Very happy about our newly named feature... I'm going to have a dram...

I wonder if a pedestal will be discovered beneath Oilean Ruaidh, like the one that was observed beneath Block Island.

By the way, while searching for information tonight on meteorites observed by Opportunity, I came across this fascinating preprint about the stony meteorites discovered by Opportunity. It also discusses, to a lesser extent, the irons. A number of questions that were brought up in this forum are discussed in this paper.

Imaging from different angles, I would say. Doing a circumnavigation first and then deciding which is the best face to put the IDD on.

Blog post updated with "finder charts" for "Red Island"

http://roadtoendeavour.wordpress.com/2010/...nd-here-we-come

Well spotted. Looks like the image was rotated for a more dramatic effect. Busted!

What about this one?
http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportunity_p2363.html

Oh, I see what you mean about the rotation. But I don't find it more dramatic, there must be some other explanation? The original is plenty dramatic enough.

I wonder if it was rotated to show the true slope of the land. Could there really be that much of a slope?

I don't know the story of the released image. But I infer it was cropped not from the original, but from the drive direction mosaic, based on the seem in the upper right. I infer from the fact that the tilt of the horizon does not match that of the original, that rover tilt was corrected for. I infer from the fact that the horizon is certainly NOT tilted that much that the rover is losing track of its tilt, and would not be surprised to see some lovely Sun images from a fine-attitude check soon. I know that sort of thing has happened in the past, where a panorama on the plains that looks just fine in "rover frame" has an ugly sine-wave when after tilt is "corrected" by an erroneous few degrees. Just some random stab-in-the-dark guesses from my living room couch.

I'm sure the press image comes mainly from this image:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...ZHP2407R2M1.JPG
If you look very closely, you can match a few hot pixels between the two.

The press image shows more of the scene towards the right than the original R2 jpeg frame I linked to. You can see that the press image has a splice near the right of the frame. But the odd thing is that there is no image down (yet) to the immediate right of the jpeg I linked to above. However, the corresponding L2 frame:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...ZHP2407L2M1.JPG
does extend a bit farther to the right, far enough to include all of the view on the right of the press image.

So what this means is that they must have spliced the corresponding L2 and R2 frames! Normally the different perspective between L and R frames would mean the result would look terrible. But it looks like they've corrected for the perspective shift by distorting (shearing) the original images so they match well. You can easily see this shear by rotating the press image to be level - it still doesn't match up with the R2 frame. Here's a comparison of the rotated press image and the R2 image:
Click to view attachment

So it looks like they've got some code that can splice L and R frames, correcting for the perspective shift, to maximize the field of view. That's pretty nice.

But this still doesn't explain why the frame was rotated in the first place. I can't see why there'd be any need to do a rotation to get the L and R frames spliced. The rotation angle is about 4 or 5 degrees, which is much more than any tilt of the ground here - Meridiani is very close to level. Maybe it was done automatically from rover orientation data, and that data is out by 5 degrees?

Edit: scooped by Deimos as far as the rotation goes!

It looks like the press release image fits well within the frame of the raw image. I don't know why the apparent splice on the right side of the press release image is there. The bottom image here shows the press release image placed over the raw image.

Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

You're right that the press image fits within the L2 jpeg frame. But most of the press image (to the left of the splice line) is from the R2 frame. You can see this by matching a few hot pixels, as I wrote. (There's one hot pixel a little over two meteorite-widths directly right of the meteorite in the R2 image. It's in the same position in the press image, but smoothed a bit.)

You can also see it by looking closely at the position of the meteorite against the background. In the animation I posted above, there's no perspective shift between meteorite and background immediately around it as you flip from R2 to press image. If you do the same with L2 and press image, there is a perspective shift.

Well now that just compounds the mystery. Why go to the trouble of splicing two images together, and leaving a distractingly obvious splice, when the whole scene can be gotten directly from one image?

It's probably just a cropped screengrab from autonomous stitching software.

Nothing weird, unusual, strange or troubling about it in any way shape or form whatsoever.

But curious, definitely curious. I would think that a press release image would be more polished, not a 'grab'. Not complaining, just wondering about this process of preparing a press release.

I love to see screen grabs showing the various software in action, but with explanation.

In a primary mission with a healthy ops budget and a healthy outreach budget - yeah. 6.75 years into a 90 day mission, not so much.

I agree with Doug here. My guess is they always automatically splice L and R frames, adjusting for perspective as I described, just for the reason that you get a bit of a wider field of view in your mosaics (or in single-L/R-pairs like this one). Presumably their code defaults to using R for most of the frame. In this case they cropped from the splice, and maybe the cropper didn't even notice the splice (I didn't notice it at first glance).

Another point is that this press image came out extremely fast. That probably helps explain why they missed the splice line and didn't bother to correct the rotation.

Oileán Ruaidh looks like a high-traffic area!
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...0M1.JPG?sol2368
It looks like we are back for a visit:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...2M1.JPG?sol2368

Did I say "ugly"? I meant...

WOW...

Click to view attachment

And a portion of it in 3D:
Click to view attachment

Opportunity seemed to be greatly excited while approaching this new treasure!
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...00P1985L0M1.JPG

Definitely metalic, itsn't it?

Oh yeah; close relative of "Block Island" for sure.

I look forward for the first "ejecta" rock we'll find on our treck. We basicaly can point out the kind of meteorites we're close, without analysing it anymore so a ejecta rock would look different, I'd said?

We've seen several already - Bounce Rock near Eagle, Russet south of the heatshield, and Marquette Island not long ago. Yes, they are different from meteorites.

Phil