Something that's apparent in the neo66's Pancam anaglyph is how the foreground bedrock is higher on the left-hand side. Comparing to the HiRise images, that's clearly the raised "collar" around Cape York's "moat". Maybe we'll head up there and take a look...

John

Not exactly slap-across-the-face obvious yet, but it's there...


Click to view attachment

Thanks Stu! Yes, it does seem like the stereo helps to pull the promontory out from the background, though maybe it's just my imagination. I hope we get some Pancams in that direction soon.

John

Absolutely - that's a stunning anaglyph! The terrain does look rough, but still tame compared with the sea of dunes we crossed to get here.

Thanks to everyone for the spectacular mosaics and animations - and congratulations to the team for getting us, backseat drivers and all, to this impossible destination.

A little late, but here's my anaglyph version of the 2676 Navcam pan. Beware the seams between images are flawed, as per usual. But still, I think I can make out Cape York in 3D - neat!

Seriously, who would have thought we would get this close and still be straining to see bits and pieces of Cape York in the pans? Certainly not me

I know; last night when people were labeling where it is, I thought they were nuts. No offense, because they were right, as far as I can tell.

Adding: That boulder is right on top of it. Who knew?

@mhoward : your navcam anaglyph really helps to see how close Cape York and Spirit Point are compared to the faraway hill.

I think I've seen this place before...

Click to view attachment

Long baseline anaglyph made from 2674 and 2676 pans posted here:
Click to view attachment

That... is awesome. Especially when one focuses on the right half of it.

I was in Carson valley Nevada exactly this time last year and I know what you mean!!

man, I am in tears reading all of this

Not a complaint, but an observation that says something about us UMSF'rs: it's interesting to compare the number of "Hey! Lookit my picture" posts about Endeavor in the past two days as compared to he paucity of posts and "ho hum" attitude about the MRO flowing water announcement.

Just an observation...and I must admit that the thrill of seeing Endeavour after so many years is much more exciting to me than the latest water announcement.

....specialy since we've got our own gullies here in front of us
Click to view attachment

It's cos we've been there sooooo many times before, I think. Images of Endeavour are immediate, real, and - in several ways! - raw. The "water on Mars" story is interesting but still just speculation; they haven't so much found the smoking gun as found a gun, behind a dumpster in the alley. So while I watched the NASA TV media event with genuine interest and excitement, it didn't stop me from going back into my My Pictures/Aug folder and drooling over the latest images of Endeavour.

Buckle up, folks, it's only going to get better.

You're a long-time member - you do realize that sharing amateur-processed images is the original purpose of this place, right?

Jeff7 gets some kind of prize for predicting Endeavour arrival at Sol 2500 back around Sol 950 - he was off by less than 300 sols. But not too big a prize, or everyone will start speculating about our Iazu arrival date and getting banned from the forum.

John

Looks like we have a name for the crater at Spirit Point : Odyssey

perhaps it's understandable

@marsroverdriver Scott Maxwell "Hey, @barbylon, NASA discovered water on Mars again. Can I knock you over with a feather?"

Probably going to be the same when MSL gets to phyllosilicates

"Oh Hey. MSL is investigating Phyllosilicates!!"

"What? Didn't Oppy do that in, like, 2011?"

MER - Been There, Done That

...and we have some new names, for features on the "island" to the south of Cape York... I won't spoil the surprise, you'll have to go look for yourselves...

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/tm-...B_Sol2676_1.jpg

No. Seriously. That's the name they've chosen*.

( * actually for a very good reason, being serious... )

If I read it right, the slope goes down about 10m each 100m or so, quite everywhere around. This is ~10%

For those who have trouble viewing anaglyphs try this trick:

Walk your eyes into slowly, step-by-step, so to speak:

open one only, for a few seconds, then open only the other, again for a few seconds, THEN open both eyes.

If I heard right today, they're going to pull short of the last 150 meters because of the ~30 feet downward still left to Spirit Point, indicated by that map. We can't quite see over the edge to SP -- like the opposite of a false peak when you're hiking.

In any case, two cool things:

1) A lot of non-critical but delicious imagery is sitting on board waiting to be downlinked.
2) A lot of additional delicious goodies will be done over the weekend, sols 2678-2680.

When we "catch up" in the coming weeks, there'll be a lot of great eye candy.

-m

So what is it: up or down?

Come on! Odyssey? Odyssey as in like Odysseus' 10 year long journey home from Troy to...Ithaca? Naa...just connecting stupid dots...

From the maps Stu & eoincampbell posted on their page.
I would say we are dropping now into Endeavor Crater

Of course Spirit's last targets were Odyssey-themed and we're near Spirit Point... but yeah, it is pretty awesome

We are most privileged to live in this era, and be aware of what's happening.

Today is a great day for humanity; Oppy approaches a once-unimaginable goal, and Juno launched for Jupiter.

.

To commemorate the long-anticipated ...

[wait for it]

... completion of 4 Martian years of optical depth monitoring, and the commencement of the fifth with tosol's downlink (oh, wait, is there something else going on?), I've put a new tool up. Actually, it is for some pretty utilitarian reasons, but the recent questions about tau numbers prompted me to share, now that I think I have it working.

So if you don't care what tau is--other than to wish it would go down--ignore this, but otherwise you'll find updates and some summary info at http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~lemmon/mars-tau-b.html. Parts of it may not work on all browsers. Since it really is just a tool to help me keep an eye on things when I am away from ops, I'm only concerned that it works on mine (recent firefox; the clock probably works with others, the plot may not like IE but seems OK with safari).

Thanks for making that public, Mark! That makes it clear that we've had a pretty good summer, tau-wise, compared with previous years. And that probably helped with the amazing progress we've made getting to Endeavour. Can't wait for the dust to settle...

I'd bet it was named in honour of the Apollo 13 Command Module...

Or the long-serving orbiter that has been Oppy's main data relay.

Or maybe it was named after the restaurant in Mission Hills, California, 25 miles from JPL, with the breathtaking view of the San Fernando Valley.

God, this is fun to watch.

-m

Looks like the backlog of images from the past week is starting to come down.

Sol 2674 (three days ago)....nice view.

Thanks Mark, I didn't realise we're starting MY5 (not to be mistaken with MI-5 )
And you're right, no curve shows on IE but's ok on safari.
We're looking at the green curve I believe (for some reason MY30 shows before MY29). Neither I realized what Fred comments about Tau's help on Oppy roving performences.

I love this picture : http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...YMP1797R0M1.JPG
It illustrates the long long way travelled by Oppy and its endeavour to reach the crater.

This confused me for a bit - I was getting unsorted MY labels but for me MY 30 was the red plot. Anyway I think Mark's been busy - it's now correctly sorting and it wasn't about 20 minutes ago. Mark - for what it's worth I've got no issues seeing the plot using Chrome on Windows, the Android phone browser or Safari on IOS4. IE9 just displays the text.

The current Martian Year Tau plot (which is purple for me now) runs up to around LS 340 as it should. The plot line for MY 28 is now red and it's more obvious that it disappears up into the stratosphere around the LS 370-320 region which corresponds to the massive storm during July\August 2007 (Sols 1220 - 1270 or thereabouts) when we briefly saw Tau numbers as high as 4.7 as I recall.

Fantastic app Mark by the way - I love to see data presented in a meaningful way like this. This makes the seasonal patterns of the atmospheric conditions very clear, and shows just how variable they can be too.

Having the Tau automatically published in this way is a real treat - it really is a live weather report from another planet.

I kinda hit the time I had allocated for making the tau page well-behaved, as opposed to just functional, with a few open issues. One is the IE thing. The other is that the data loads asynchronously, but is kicked off in the proper order. So it tries to load in the right order, but the file sizes differ. So, you get random ordering to the Mars years, and random colors. When it bugs me enough, I think I know how to implement the fix.

Here's the 360x90 Navcam panorama from Sol 2674 (August 2). The apparent dip of the land should be taken with a grain of salt; I tried to correct the rover orientation data, but probably did not get it exactly right.

Interestingly, there's a component to the apparent tilt of the image at certain rover azimuths because of clock drift.

-m

That's interesting. There was some mention recently of attempting to warm the rover's electronics to try to mitigate clock drift. Is it possible to just reset the clock to correct for the drift?

After they named some new points at the crater rim, I updated my Google Earth / Mars placemark file.

I added explanations of every point around Endeavour crater and Cape York, so we can see, what's the origin of the name is. Please correct me, if I took the wrong places. (Is Antares crated really named after a Apollo lunar module (it's just my assumption)).

I took the explanations from Wikipedia, and added also links to it. So everyone can find out, whats is behind this name. Most names are connected to Lt. James Cooks journeys. Who did believe this?

Here is a screenshot.

I also updated the list of meteorites placemark file with also adding excerpts from the Wikipedia.

[EDIT: Little typo in crater name]

Images post sol 2678 drive down. Navcams look beautiful!

There are a bunch of Hazcams as well related to a technology demonstration.

-m

About 70m further tosol (2678) - should have a great view of Spirit point now!

Yes and no. That's an extraordinarily complex issue, not least because we have to ask the question, "What clock?" and the question, "Relative to what?"

We have several ways of mitigating the drift, none of which are trivial. There's no real *reset* button to do it. (And for good reason.)

We have seen less drift of this particular clock when the rover is warmer. The theory is well supported by the data, but we have yet to implement the fix in tactical activities. It's low on our radar.

I'll stop talking before I get in over my head.

-m

So what is this and how did it form?

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...YMP1944R0M2.JPG

It this a little dust-filled deflation hollow? Have we seen things like this before?

.