Ireland... "Everyone Knows Where That Is"

Around 90m in total.

Playing around with Goggle Earth I found what looks like another contact layer similar to Cambridge Bay right in the planned path. My 2cents that we will stop for a few sols right there next week.

Ireland... the one that got away...

Yep, happy to get any pictures, any time, but obviously not at the expense of reaching Endeavour.

Why is the overnight cold bothering it now, when spring is warming Mars in the southern hemisphere? “We’re still talking Mars,” noted Nelson. “In middle of Martian day, it’s warm enough that this thing is still working properly, but late in the afternoon or evenings, we don’t get it to work right.”

That may seem really unfortunate for many who have been following this mission since lot of the Mössbauer integrations occurred overnight. “But we’re not going to do extensive Mössbauer investigations for a while, and by the time we get to these hydrated rocks and the rim of Endeavour, we’ll be beyond the real cold temperatures at night,” Arvidson pointed out. “The power source of the instrument is so depleted. Cobalt-57 has a half-life is 271.8 days, so we’re down many half-lives and we have to spend days and days making measurements now. We won’t do take that time anymore unless there’s something extraordinary. The next big campaigns will be when we see the hydrated rocks detected by CRISM, possibly as close at Santa Maria, and then when we get to the clay minerals at the rim.”

And, yes, they are planning for the rover to stop at Santa Maria, just a short jag off the route. On this fairly “fresh” crater, it appears that the impact has “punctured through the bedrock,” as Arvidson put it. Now about 2.7 kilometers away, Santa Maria is luring the team for another reason.

“As we get close to Endeavour, there’s a change in the characteristics observed by CRISM [onboard MRO] and we start to see hydrated rock that’s exposed, which we don’t see where we are today,” explained Arvidson. “Santa Maria might be close enough so that when it formed, it did so in those hydrated rocks. That’s one of the reasons we’re stopping.” Added Squyres: “We’ll see when we get there.”

In recent sols, the team further lifted Opportunity’s drive limits to 140 meters per sol. “That is a pretty long drive,” admitted Nelson. “We don’t always have the time to do such long drives, but we think the rover can do longer backward autonavs, because the rover is now moving into terrain where there’s a lot less sand and a lot more outcrop. That gives the rover -- and us -- plenty of features to use in our calculations and we anticipate seeing even longer drives because we have the energy and because it hasn’t been hurting the wheel current. We just haven’t seen the run-ups in current that were indicative of problems or at least of concern to us, like we did when we were driving forward.”

It may have seemed like a bit of fun, but I believe Squyres was serious when he said he wanted MER to identify the phyllosilicates before the arrival of MSL.

Anything short of an encounter by Opportunity with a saguaro

As we're all getting excited about Santa Maria, might be time for a quick reminder of how big it is...

http://roadtoendeavour.wordpress.com/2010/...re-are-we-going

to avoid some old craters.

Interesting feature

Sure would be nice if there were a color image of this area

Need more analysis, but weekend's attempt at RHAZ-based autonav succeeded. Got 15m, then bailed out 'cuz we boxed it in. Promising, though.

02382 p2542.26 0 0 0 0 0 0 pancam_Choc_Bay_L257R2