And judging from the grid lines, that makes a half-marathon in a new personal and world record of 2275 sols (or 6 years, 4 months back on Earth)--starting the timer at landing on sol 1 rather than at egress.

Here's yet another "plot" to the route map, after this last drive which happened during sol 2279.
Since the start of the east drive, the route plot was quickly reaching the right end of the background map to it was time to add another 1km x 1km square to the map. This map was already really big and unfortunately it became too big to manage it as a single picture on my PC so it's time to move on a new image. I'm posting here again the whole route map from Victoria up to date since it will probably be the last update of this picture.
Click to view attachment

Now, moving on to the new map, this picture will cover the whole "east drive" until reaching Santa Maria (mini-Endurance). I thought it would be better to have the whole background until that waypoint right now instead of adding those 1km squares when needed, because it is important to have the (intermediate) destination on sight. It was my initial intention to cover the whole route up to Endeavour but, again, too much to this laptop; that last section will have to be done on a third picture in the future.
Click to view attachment

Edit: updated the grid's transparency.

Wow, scrolling back along the route from Victoria is amazing both from the point of view of what Oppy has accomplished and the amount of work you've put into mapping all the hundreds of sites (knowing how much work goes into each one from the few times I've tried to fill in) Astonishing work Eduardo.

Great to see Santa Maria on the map - looks like some interesting terrain coming up as we head out into the 'parking lot'.

One suggestion: Could you make your grid lines a similar shade of gray as in the previous version? The white lines distract a little too much from the terrain underneath for my eye.

Oh, thanks for pointing that. The grid should have had a sort of transparency which I just forgot to set.

Done. I've updated the picture in my previous post.

Here's another point at the map; sol 2281.
Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

Hi to everybody! I was looking at Tesheiner`s map and I thought of a possible (the easiest and safest) route for Oppy. What do you say, could that be the one MER team will actually use? Tell me, which do you think would be the best route Oppy should take...

While it can be fun to speculate, the one truism related to the Mars Rovers is that you can never try to guess which will be the 'safest and easiest' route by just looking at the orbital images. The ground beneath the Rovers wheels is the only truth and each drive is full of hidden and potentially fatal dangers.

Also, this thread is for the official map--discussion should go in a different or new thread. Since Tesheiner's big map is almost 500 KB, I'm not sure UMSF wants a thread with 20 modified versions = 10 MB. Maybe we can see how close Ipparchus guessed and leave it as an experiment of one.

Thank you all for your answers!!! I really appreciate all the great work you all are doing.
And what makes me even more happy is that you always answer to questions and care!

Have a nice day everybody!

Greetings // Robert

Update after sol 2283.
Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

Aw heck, she's changed her mind about the whole Endeavour thing and is going back to Victoria...

Hmm. Dune avoidance maneuver? Must've seen something they didn't like ahead...doesn't look as if they saw anything they did like in that new direction.

Oh, and Stu: Belated thanks for your last 3D!

You're more than welcome

Hmm, looks like a nice "corridor" to the north a bit...?

http://twitpic.com/20dqtv

yes, the last 2 maneuvres, SE to 2281 and NE to 2283 just look like a dune-avoidance zig-zag to get around the larger dunes north of the 2281 postion. The general trend from 2279 to 2283 is due East.

The East trend is reinforced by today's 70m drive. Here's a map crop with the latest plot corresponding to sol 2286.
Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

While Eduardo is otherwise occupied with life's myriad demands, there is a Tim Parker map update on the MER site to tie us over. Another 2 drives, another 140 meters of solid progress to the east. These drives were made on sols 2288 and 2293.

Is the 70m per driving sol limited by the energy currently available, or are they held back by other factors (wheel current etc).

I guess what I'm asking is will we see the drives lengthen in the weeks to come or will 70m continue to be the norm?

Neil

They've found that 70m backwards keeps the RF wheel current at bay on the current terrain. Who knows, maybe things will change on the flatter terrain and more extensive bedrock ahead. (This is not a route map question, btw.)

... like summer vacations, for instance!
I stole some time to do a quick update of my route map covering up to sol 2295, and here it is. I would call it a "blind" update since it is only based on the data reported by the rover itself and is not corrected i.e. registered with the help of navcam mosaics; that would be the best but takes too much time in the current circumstances.
Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

Ah, always a relief when normal service is resumed... Good to have you and the fantastic updates back.

Talking about resumption of "normal service"... last I heard from the webmaster of the Exploratorium site was that he was hoping to have everything back up and running again "within the week", after bringing in JPL to help with some issues. That was a week ago. So maybe we'll be able to follow things on Exploratorium again soon.

Great news. I was just about to suggest we organise a whip-round for a new hard drive.

Will the jump back to near real time produce a striking step change in the vista, I wonder?

Welcome back, Eduardo!
Based on your last map, average straight shift was 15.5 m/sol in last 50 sols. Extrapolating it, it will take 290 sols to Santa Maria crater and (ehm) 666 sols to cape Tribulation... this corresponds to May 2012, if I didn't make errors.

Eduardo, thank you for all you do. I'm wondering if you could add two lines of links at the bottom of your posts back to summary posts and maps:
.
Post #2752 ____ Last update of trip from Victoria to Endeavor ____ Map
Post #2753 ____ Current map of drive to Santa Maria ____ Map

That may not be very fair. Over the past 50 sols, there's been delays to assess glitches with the rover.

Perhaps, we should include other similar glitches/stop in the future, for realistic evaluations... Anyway, for completeness, full avrage odometry was 16.3 m/sol from the start of East path (Sols 2245-2294).

Two points.

Firstly, after six and a half years, surely you've learnt that the Xm/sol divided by Ym to go = arrival date is utterly utterly useless. It's never worked, it's never going to work.

Secondly - this is NOT the place for that discussion. I'm not sure how many times we have to say it - this is a thread for route maps and route maps ONLY.

Dilo, Floyd, H4I - you should ALL know better, in both instances.

You're right, Doug.

My large scale 100 sol route map updated for 2300.

Click images to enlarge.

..

Also posted, along with a bit more text on my website.

James

Doing a very crude straight line distance measure between your points, James, and then following your projected path to Cape York...we're not far from the 1/2 way point in distance from Victoria. About the 40-45% range now. Obviously the path isn't straight and won't be, but it's a ballpark.

Here's a map update, including the latest drive i.e. sol 2301.
Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

Wow: 2299,2300,2301...
now she's really flying: can't remember when we last saw three successive driving sols in a row

It's almost like they set 3 drives=200 m goal for Oppy.

The 2311 traverse map is up at JPL.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/traverse_maps.html

I'm finally "back to business" so let me start with some versions updated up to sol 2315.
Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

Sol 2320.
Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

Sol 2232.
Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

Here's an updated version after reading an entry on Scott's twitter. I simply forgot that!

> ... And our 1-km-capable rover clocked past 22km last night.

Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

An update after the weekend's drive.
Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

Sol 2326.
Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

I have a suggestion for the daily updates: recenter the mini-maps so there is enough area beyond the current position to guess where the next stop will be.

Maybe it'd be easier for anyone who wants to predict the next stop, to do that using Parker's official route maps, which are at higher resolution, or other higher resolution orbital images that have been posted?

Ever since Eduardo began including the Google Mars kml, as well as the HIRISE overlays, that has really been the optimum way to get a good look at where we are, where we've been, and where we are going. Not sure why another image would be necessary.

Guess away ...

Let's have a try.
I'm usually keeping the "mini-maps" small (< 200x200pix) to avoid the automatic resizing done by the forum software, e.g. compare the last post (sol 2326) with the previous one. The problem is that with these 70m+ drives we loose a lot of context if the tiny image is centered on the last position because there's slightly more then a single drive on the picture. I can try making these pictures a little bit bigger (e.g. 400x200) but not too much since I don't want to be posting "big" (100KB+) attachments every day.

Of course, I'm speaking about the map@1m/pix. If anybody wants a higher resolution picture the answer already is on the two previous posts.

Oh well, I guess I'm the only one who thinks where we are going next is the more interest context than where we were. Surprising, because I don't remember anyone fighting over for the rear facing seats of the station wagon when we took long family trips when I was a kid.

alan, I think that after 6.5 years of Tesh's maps keeping us in touch with the journey, they have served us well and provide the quick update for following the rover's course.
There are more detailed maps available of the 'road ahead' that he makes available now and again and as has been said before in this thread "it's fun to speculate what the next stop might be, but you can never second guess what might be just around the next corner for these vehicles". One thing I do is take the full map that he provides and then take each daily update and paste that onto the big version. Then I can following along and look ahead.
Of course you can always take a look at the now marvellously detailed maps on the Rover's own website or download the highest resolution maps from the HiRise website.

OK, so now let's settle down in the back seat again and let mom and dad get back to the driving.

Ok, here's the update corresponding to sol 2327. Let's see how is looks like...
Click to view attachment Click to view attachment Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

To be fair, I like alan's idea but the visual result on the post is not good since you must open the attachment to really see the details. From the three thumbnails ("mini-maps") above, my choice is still the rightmost one. It is still possible to see the leftmost picture without the automatic resizing but it means I would have to host the thumbnails on a different site and that's definitely not an option.

So what we have is a case of 1)looks like a route map, 2)shows the terrain visible in the in the drive direction mosaic, 3)is small enough to avoid resizing; pick any two. Oh well.

I have no problem with having to enlarge the reduced version.

Phil