LOL!!!

(I should fill a whole page of those smileys)

Good one, Ustrax! When I get home from this trip I'm going to get to work on a ... suitable... response.

Phil

LOL at Ustrax. Hey Phil. Since you will get to Victoria before Oppy does with Ustrax chasing you down. Can you tell us what's in the bottomless pit or Abyss?



and Tesheiner. What is the path Phil is running from the Overhead Shots???

Perhaps Tesheiner could annotate his map with the projected path using a distinctive colour, such as pink... ...and for music, it has to be the Benny Hill theme!

Bob Shaw

Gentlemen! Gentlemen! This won't do. We are UMSF, and we cannot allow the tyranny of distance - whether geographic or socio-cultural - to disrupt our cohesive spirit. We must be able rationally to bridge this gulf between Ustrax and Phil. Let me propose the following plan:
Ustrax travels to meet climber and gives him a huge warm hug. Next, climber goes to Italy, finds Dilo, and plants a wet kiss on each of his cheeks (facial, of course). Dilo, in turn journeys to Tesh and gives him an affectionate pinch on one cheek. Tesh transfers to Brazil, up to Texas, and warmly tousles the hair of Cosmic Rocker. CosRoc meets up with ElkGroveDan and slaps him on the butt. Dan travels to Minnesota where he pats Doug VanDorn on the shoulder, who crosses over into Canada and gives Phil the warm, but formal handshake he secretly longs for.

I see no insurmountable barriers to this plan. (giggle)

A straight line from the current position to the crater's center.



And back to business, post-drive images from sol 814 are down on the exploratorium. Dunes everywhere!
I think I'll have to take a look to the tracking web to know the current position, otherwise it will be *very difficult* to calculate the net driving distance and update the map.

James, do you have already something?

Ok, if I got that data correctly this is the new position after tosol drive.

Click to view attachment

The new site corresponds more or less to my wild guess here. More exactly, to the right (south) of the outcrops on the previous "lane".

This is not an old proverb. This is a direct quote of one of the USA's finast philosphers and ball players, Yogi Berra. Check out http://www.yogiberra.com/yogi-isms.html Your invocation of one of his more memorable yogi-isms reminds me of another of his sayings of which I would judge this site has litle risk of fullfilling, and I paraphrase ....'This place is so popular, nobody goes there anymore.'

Thanks to all for such a pleasant daily experience.

Yes, the same here. I had a real good laugh tonight reading all this

Nico

This whole business would be a lot easier if we had some female company.

Phil

Yes, the same here. I had a real good laugh tonight reading all this
Nico

Do we have to start a new topic called "Pool : arrival of Phil at Victoria" ?

Ok Phil... here you go!

I love you all - in a hand-shaky sort of way.

Phil

Looks good to me, that's exactly the position I get from the tracking data.

james

Phil:

Your hands are shaking? No wonder!

Bob Shaw

We do, Phil. But in her present delicate condition she might find the responsibility altogether too strenuous.
(She would rack up some frequent flyer points though.)

Perhaps this will help with Shaka's excellent hands around the world plan:
Frappr - UMSF
Come on folks, fill in those blanks!

That is absolutely bizarre. A great idea, but bizarre.

--Bill

But,...,MRO has already started to take images on Mars, recently was close to MER-A (West of Hella basin) and also close to MER-B (North of Argyre crater. Then, does anyone know if MRO will again test its HiRSIC again over the MER's sites before than October 2006?

Rodolfo

No - HiRISE is off until aerobraking is finished.

Doug

Oh boy...It is good to be back...

Click to view attachment

Back to the thread's topic...

An updated route map (sol 815). The rover is currently located 47m (parallax measurements) north of that outcrop with a dark cobbles field.

Click to view attachment

That dark cobble field ahead looks like a sink hole. Why hasn't this hole been filled in by the dunes and sand movement?

Click to view attachment

Prometheus:

A sink-hole would indeed be nice - but rather than asking why the area hasn't been filled in, what about asking what's taken the infilling material away, instead?

I hope we get a good look, anyway!

Bob Shaw

Not a bad look today: http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...RHP2408L2M1.JPG

Just looks like another "etch" to me.

Here is the route map, updated to sol 816. I thought it was time to move the background map; "Corner Crater" can be seen at the bottom if the zoom view (left side).

Click to view attachment



I posted a pancam mosaic on the "Moving south to Victoria" thread.

Any progres on that AMAZING route map Phil?
Are you planing on updating it with last ~40 sols driving?

Hi - I will post something from time to time. Ultimately the full thing will be in my future book on Mars.

Phil

Hope you will pick up any comic caricature in your book invented by any member of UMSF for you?

Rodolfo

That will be most of the book!

Phil

Route map, updated to sol 817.

Click to view attachment

[quote name='Tesheiner' date='May 12 2006, 11:16 PM' post='53970']
Route map, updated to sol 817.

If we refer to the "vista" you've just posted on "moving South to Victoria", can we say that the "sink hole" is the black feature actualy on the right of Oppy and the "big dune" a part of the "crater-like" feature that'll be left on the rigth hand side when joining the other blue line ?

I'd say the sinkhole is the lighter colored oval, just under the "7"

Here's a polar pan I did and used to pinpoint rover's position on sol 816.

Click to view attachment

The "sinkhole" is the black feature Not to repeat Climber's post; his description is correct.

And taking advantage of this post, a polar pan for sol 817.
Click to view attachment

... and a picture depicting common features which can be matched on the route map and the polar projections.

Click to view attachment

Excellent identification, Tesheiner!
Hey guys, Oppy is now only 630m from the "edge crater" and less than 1.2 Km from VC rim!!!

Yes, almost halfway to VC now...

And 35m corner crater is very insteresting. I'm sre Oppy will visit it, and we'll see some great images.

At some point, presumably after "doing" Victoria, I'd like a look at that well defined small crater on the smooth ejecta blanket of Victoria to the southwest of the crater. It's got very nicely defined short bright rays.

If anybody wants to know...there is new Opportunity traverse map at JPL...
It's spectacularly low resolution...
I don't know why I even look that way sometimes...
Hurray for Tesheiner!!!
He should really get a hug from somebody....

Well, we look at the JPL one to see the odometry, but not much else....

[quote name='kenny' date='May 16 2006, 11:21 PM' post='54427']
Well, we look at the JPL one to see the odometry, but not much else....

Nasa/JPL didn't said for quite a while the number of hits the whole related "rover web sites" get. Does anybody know where we are by now ? I'm also wondering if UMSF is considered by Nasa/JPl as a "rover web sites". It has to. May be Doug can tell us how many hits related to MER's rovers UMSF got.

I can't say how many hits a specific section has had...but the figure "total topic views" is the most appropriate.

Currently it's

Spirit
870052
Opportunity
780623
Cometary and Asteroid Missions
281068
Icy Moons
188708
Titan
157542
New Horizons
136868
Past and Future
112563
Tech, General and Imagery
101139
Cassini General
86982
Community Chit Chat
68743
Jupiter
67795
MRO 2005
58656
Mars Express & Beagle 2
55411
Manned Spaceflight
54527
SMART-1 + Lunar Exploration
49469
MSL 2009
37405
Venus
36475
Front Page Stories
36310
Mars
36213
Space Based Observing
31161
Private Missions
28017
EVA MMU
27017
Mars Global Surveyor
26312
Forum Management
26062
Books and Resources
24343
Pluto / KBO
23709
Venus Express
22237
Earth Observations
21660
Director Updates
20973
Policy and Strategy
20173
Voyager and Pioneer
20017
Sun
19866
Uranus and Neptune
18401
Phoenix 2007/8
13650
Mercury
11142
Mars Odyssey
10776
Messenger
9997
Saturn
4047
Outer Solar System
2264


Total 3600263

If you add up the MER related ones (Spirit, Oppy, Imagery) - it's 1751814 - so about half of all forum activity.

That's a stat from the forum software. From the hosting as off the end of March - 155,700 unique visitors ( i.e. seperate IP's that have visited) and a total of 506,000 site visits, 5.3 Million page views and 315.75 gig of bandwidth. The number of 'hits' is actually 35,275,071 - but that's for every page, image, etc etc - and there's probably 10 images on every page as a minimum.

Doug

All I can say is: Wow. Those are "knock your socks off" numbers!

Phillip

What you want is a webstat analyzer. There are lots out there, but the one I used to use was Analog, which if free and can be downloaded from here:

http://www.analog.cx/

Analog can be configured in a vast number of ways, including getting it to filter out hits on things like images from the graphs and tables it produces to help give a truer indication of the number of hits a page gets.

It does require access to the log files, though, so I dunno how useful it can be for UMSF.com.

======
Stephen

Problem is - UMSF doesnt have 'pages' - it's all dynamically generated by IPB using PHP and SQL. The IPB stats are the most appropriate.

Doug

Doug,

If I was running this thing , what I would be the most proud of would be : 155,700 unique visitors. Even if some of us could log in from +2 different computers, this is realy impressive. You deserve a big HUG.
Climber

Would be nice to know how many of those hits are from within the "nasa.gov" domain.
But we are probably speaking of info that couldn't (or shouldn't) be published.

Back to the thread's topic, here is an updated route map (sol 821).

Click to view attachment

155,700 unique visitors are amazing, almost feel shy to post when I think about it.

And thank you for keeping the work up Tesheiner, last few days and right now im in firm agreement with you. For sol 821 we simply cant be anywhere else than where you have indicated.

Looks like about 4 football field lengths to go to get to corner crater.