CosmicRocker, you asked about my technique for route map construcion/integration.
When a good panorama isn't yet available, I start to construct the mosaic using a very artigianal anti-vignetting tool (based on PSP illumination effect). Then I match images, normally using AutoStitch; lot of work is often needed to have a flat horizon; moreover, sometime, AS program introduce also a vertical distorsion (the image height is varing with azimut) so I need to correct with PSP again. Possibly, some rotation and local luminosity/contrast adjustment are needed too.
When obtained a good panorama, with a flat horizon and good overall uniformity, I englarge it's canvas in order to have a cylindrical map (horizon must lie close to the center height).
The panorama is then used as a texture in PovRay. For vertical projection, it is projected on a flat terrain 1.5m below the point of view. If rover is tilted, further adjustments are needed (pitch and roll angles). Usually, I make a 2000x2000 map with a scale of 10cm/pixel. Some fine luminosity/contrast adjustments are often needed, locally and globally.
Finally, the most difficult part is identify the location and merge with previous projections. Following suggestion from Forum members, I use as background a rescaled MOC image (like Phil strategy) and try to orient/translate the center portion of vertical projection on common features. Sometime, I use also some heading referring points for orientation (like far craters) because in the past I was accumulating orientation errors... (another suggestion from members!)

As you can see, is not an easy task; I have to dedicate lot of time on each step and sometimes results weren't fully satisfyng. For this reason, ironically, I enjoied recent Opportunity stall because gived me possibility to work on other tasks...

This is a different version of the Sol 649 polar pan. The middle distance is emphasized. North is at the top.

Phil

Click to view attachment

OMG!! I begged for a bone and you guys served me up a feast.

...so much to digest, though. You guys are good, and I bow to your expertise. Your explanations help me better understand the work you do to create these beautiful maps. But it is now apparent that I have much work to do if I would hope to be an apprentice. I am overwhelmed.

Thanks for the details. I think I will enjoy your maps while I hone my basic skills in the image processing software that I have.

Yes, Phil, thanks for the feast! Those polars are exactly what I was thinking about.

I've lost track of place names. I'm not sure what the outcrop in Sol 651 is named; it fascinates me because it may be related to the "dark bluff" at the Mogollon Rim/Payson outcrop.

--Bill

This is the second of the Sol 649 pans, originally by jvandriel, in polar form.

Phil

Click to view attachment

New JPL Oppy Route Map to Sol 659

How close is Opportunity to leaving the landing target oval? It can't be very far now.

Here is an older route map (out of date now), but it shows the landing ellipse line just south of the Erebus crater.

Here's the whole context:

http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/0...llipsefinal.jpg

Here be Dragons!

That crater to the west of Victoria looks particularly inviting....

But I'm not holding my breath!

Actually, we got pretty lucky having Oppy come down where it did, at least horizontally its almost close as you can get to the freshest looking big crater in the whole visible context. all the other craters are either small or have been eroded away so much (just smoothed divots remain) that theres doubtfully any signfficantly exposed vertical strata cliffs on the inside walls. They look like they may even predate the wet period so all visible surfaces could be affected similarly with not a lot of variation so not much of a geological window to explore. Victoria is absolutely huge and just about as fresh as it gets on Mars. Keep on going Oppy, this is gonna be the bees knees!

Except, if Oppy landed in the central area of the landing ellipse, it could have travelled less distance to the kilometres-wide crater (just north outside the ellipse).

But I'll be real glad to see Victoria, don't get me wrong.

Nico

Nice to see you, ustrax, that you are still here...

Merry Christmas from your old friend
youremi

Pando = youremi?!
Man! I'm glad to know something about you!
What a great days we had in the beggining of the mission...
When everything was so...new!
I'll not forget your precious help with my lack of orientation...
A Merry merry Xmas to you and your family, but I believe we'll chat before that...

Isn't it just a little bit to early for that? I have a feeling that somebody will soon open "MERRY Xmas" topic...
BTW where have you been Ustrax? Looooooong vacation?

YEs I guess it is...
I've working hard and on the last two weeks I've been on vacations...
Had time to check things once and awhile, but no time to intervene, let's see if this changes now and I earn some time to leave orbit and land safely on Mars again.
I've got some promises to keep and some prizes to deliver...

The immediate route: here is where we are and where and how we will be:

--Bill

Ustrax, Thank you for the context.

Overall I think we got real lucky with 3 major craters, increasing in size, and hopefully make to Victoria.

At the Hayden, Steve could not predict when or if Victoria is attainable but the road ahead looks promising. So we can dream about the magnificent view.

He also said that theoretically there are enough battery cycles to last 6 or 7 years. So if nothing significant breaks mechanically or electrically, that crater to the West does look "tasty" but a bit fanciful. Lots of interesting targets to the East also

Are we going to look at the burnt tree stump first? (before Mogollan)

I think that, given how long Opportunity was busy at Endurance, Victoria could be its final resting place. Of course, who knows if they'll actually risk entry. If they were on the correct slope though, it'd be a great place to spend the winter, and possibly get some Endurance-class cleanings.
That's a huge crater too. Just the dune field in the middle of it looks as big as all of Endurance.

Tempting target, and the path to it doesn't look too sandy. But I think they'd have to backtrack and go to Mogollon a diiferent way since the path looks treacherous past "the burning bush"

I guss ity would depend on what the miniTES shows: if it has a similar composition to the dark outcrop at the Mogollon Rim, then they may be inclined to pass it up. If it is different, then they'll go for a look.

My guess; YMMV.

--Bill

Here's a new map of Endurance crater - a base for people to plot routes or whatever. It's still got some rough bits, which I will fix later.

This is a composite of three images: a cPROTO image from MOC, and the two rim panoramas reprojected to fit the MOC geometry.

Right now I'm trying to fit together the pans from the western rim driving around sols 90 to 100 to map the outside better.

Phil

Click to view attachment

This is amazing work Phil. One of the things that really stands out is the relative proportions of the features we've all come to know and love. For example, I had pictured Burns cliff taking up a much larger percentage of the crater perimeter. And Wopmays appear far larger than I might have imagined in relation to the entire crater.

Take off your touque, pop open a Labatt's and stretch out on the chesterfield. You've earned it, eh?

Hey, it's way too cold to take off my touque! I'm not in sunny California... But thanks. I'm going to have to take a few days off and spend some time with my other family.

Phil

Awesome work, Phil!! Indescribable ...

BRILLIANT - What one could do is take all the engineering plots from the zip's at the workbook site and use them to plot a really accurate route within endurance. Do you have a reasonable scale for that thing Phil?

I used the engineering plot to find out which way they left the Heatshield impact. It's a bit annoying to download 100Meg+ of seemingly nothing to get a single plot, but the results could be worth it

Doug

I'll deal with the scale issue later. The original file I created was 5000 pixels across. I will resample it to a precise pixel scale later, but for now the diameter of the crater rim (180 m, I think) can be used to establish the approximate scale. Do the engineering plots adequately account for slippage? If not there could be problems.

Phil

Phil, thats a mighty nice picture. Thanks

Amazing Phil! Wow, they are looking more and more like real shots from above.

Must join to the chorus, congratulations Phil!

mm, yes, if I might also add woo and indeed yay.

Phil: GOSH-WOW-BOY-OH-BOY!

Has anyone heard any thing about when they plan to start attempting to drive again? Do they have a rover at JPL they are testing with the IDD not stowed to see how it affects the rovers mobility?

This is what I'm working toward with the mobility data - each sol they drive has a map, but they use different scale maps depending on how far they drive on any one sol (so a 1m drive might be on a map that's 5 x 5m, but 50m drive might be on a map that's 50m x 50m, but the map will be 500px x 500px in both cases)

My plan is to go around, pasting them one on top of the other, for the whole Endurance campaign Once it's done, I'll then make my own, tidy version over the top with a rover for each end of sol position and hopefully, a phil-o-matic Endurance map under it

I'm thinking of keeping it around 5cm per pixel, which would be a 4k x 4k map of Endurance.

This is sols 264 to 271

Doug

This is from entry up to sol 249ish - plenty of work AFTER doing this but it works really well.

Similar maps for Eagle, and the Heatshield are future plans, but I'll do this one properly first.

Doug

Doug, looks good. I have been making annotated sketch maps of rover routes since sol 1. Combined with these, we would have a nice resource. May I suggest we work together to plot the route inside Endurance, overlay it on my photomap, and add all the names etc.? This would be a very nice pilot project for an overall documentation of the MER missions.

Phil

Each one of those points could be a keyframe for a really neat animation.

I am just curious to know about the source information about the azimuth and travel distance of MER. The Doug's map are so precise that I seems that only JPL rovers might know it.

Rodolfo

One of the daydreams I have is to input the MER data into a GIS program and be able to follow the Rovers sol-by-sol in a Phil-o-Vision map view, and be able to click on various features and pull up rover's-eye views of the victim. Do-able, but can you imagine the database you'd need?

Think of it as Meridiani Meets Matrix...

--Bill

Well - you're describing SAP - the 3d environment in which they program the rovers activities. Sadly, it will never make it into the public domain, nor the huge ammount of data needed to drive such a simulation. but oh boy, wouldnt it be amazing

Doug

was wondering about that, because when they released Maestro to the public when the MERs landed, put out a few datasets and then promptly abandoned it, it looked like Maestro was some sort of dumbed-down version of what operations uses. I guess SAP is Maestro's superhero brother? is there much similarity?

Maestro is to SAP as Photoshop Elements is to Photoshop CS2

There was a movie of Spirit driving up near the summit, that was from SAP / RSVP ( similar thing)

Doug

Where the heck is Oppy now? I haven't seen a route map for a while.

Yes, is a lot of time... (see last map here)
anyway
Even if no movement was done, is a good idea to refresh with these vertical+polar projections, based on James great Panorama. In the first one (done at the usual 10cm/pixel scale) I underlined also approximate Erebus rim... consider, howewer, that topography introduce some distorsion, especially inside crater.
Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

Yes, it’s over five weeks at Purgatory Pavement now. When MER-B arrived at this patch of outcrop around sol 631- two months ago- I thought they would grind a spot or two and proceed to the Mogollan rim about 80 meters to the south. Even before the IDD arm problem I was wondering why there was so little driving. The rover was on a perfect driving surface, and there was a fat science target just a few days drive away. The evaporate “paving stones” looked similar to what we had seen dozens of times before.

Whatever the thinking was, I really hope the IDD arm is used only on high priority targets once we finally start moving again.

The last 7/8 months really havent been that good for Opportunity.

Look at the bright side. After two terms in purgatory, the Opster must be close to beatification !
C'mon, Laddie! Roll on to glory!

I'm starting to get desperate here....
Is there anybody who know when will Opportunity start moving again?
It's been almost 2 months now....

I seems it will be very soon since Oppy has plenty pictures around him so it has no more places to take pictures. I don't know about the lenght time for IDD integration since it is already worn and need greater lenght of time to complete.

Rodolfo