This is after yesterday's (sol 2560) drive; back on top of an outcrop patch.
Click to view attachment

And according to rover driver Scott Maxwell's tweet, another 130m move should be executed today.

Might be heading towards Distant Vistas here (please feel free to move), but good eyes Phil!

There does seem to be a subdued and dark crater on those slopes. Getting a rough view alignment between my HiRISE DEM and your stretched pan shows a pretty good match, and where this dark thing is.

Click to view attachment

And looking a bit closer from another angle it is still there.

Click to view attachment


But there's a bit of driving to do before we get here...
Pete

We traveled 145 meters on sol 2560? Impressive (if accurate)!

Back on the light, crumbly stuff...

Click to view attachment

...and a 3D panorama... hills on horizon... and the swathe of lighter rock looks very hummocky to me...

http://twitpic.com/4iek86/full

With sol 2560's drive, that's almost exactly a full kilometer of driving in the two weeks since she left Santa Maria -- to put that in perspective, there are roughly only 5km left to the base of Cape York (as the crow flies). So as long as our rover driver friends can keep up this pace and steer those wheels straight with no stops for sightseeing, we're going to be there sooner than any of us might have imagined.

The Pancam R2 view on Sol 2561.

Jan van Driel


Click to view attachment

We're coming up out of the shallow depression that contained Santa Maria, so the view is opening up again in front of us. Nice!

Phil

The most over the top estimate of how far Oppy could drive in how long was tweeted by Scott Maxwell. He was trying to calculate how long it would take Oppy to drive to Spirit's current location to clean Spirit's solar panels:

Mars radius = 3400km, circumference = 21k km. To go ~half that (~10k km) @ 1km/8 days = 80k days = 219 yrs!

You've got 150 years to get it done, Scotty.

Aye, captain.

If they keep the current heading, we will reach a 25m crater in 850m or so.

Very nice view of the nearest hills...

Click to view attachment

Amazing Pace !

Amazing Place!

Vrroooooooooooooom, straight down the run line. Look at her go!

830m ahead is a "double crater" that looks like an interesting place to stop and hang out for a few sols' rest...

Click to view attachment

Here's how big they are compared to Santa Maria...

Click to view attachment

(taken from: http://roadtoendeavour.wordpress.com/2011/...ark-stuff-again )

Responding to CosmicRocker's post in the map thread:

Yes; if there was anything interesting to see in the "dark terrain", it was too subtle at least for me to pick out. Oh well... onward!

Your map is great and it feels like reading an old S/F novel wandering among the stars with big voids of space and nothing to see in between... It's af if we just left Sol (Santa Maria) and are heading towards a red dwarf star with its mysterious planet ("double crater"). We are going to fly-by this planet just before encoutering the red dwarf, but we know that we are are irresistibly drawn by the giant Arcturus (Endeavour)
Click to view attachment

"if there was anything interesting to see in the "dark terrain", it was too subtle at least for me to pick out."

Not much obvious to see, but the surface was noticeably rougher. Elsewhere we had the extremely smooth surface with tiny ripples, as at Eagle crater. Here we had a generally rougher surface, and to me it looked as if a layer about 10 or 20 cm thick had been eroded away to reveal it. It would be interesting to map the distribution of the darker patches all around this area, to see it the distribution offers clues to its origin.

Phil

I realize that the remaining distance is the same as driving twice around Victoria.
As can understand my french speaking collegues, "autant dire un jet 2 Pi R..."

It was pretty subtle, alright. Honestly, I was expecting it to be significantly more exciting. I'd have to agree with Phil regarding the surface appearing to be rougher. I was pretty much perplexed until it occurred to me that this dark terrain may simply be a large exposure of the Halfpipe formation. Some of us geologizers had previously started a thread devoted to the Halfpipe formation, where it was revealed that the name was informally applied to certain dark patches of coarse material overlying bedrock.

I think one of the best exposures of the "formation" was observed on sols 707-717 as shown in the image I posted almost 5 years ago in the Halfpipe thread. See also, this comment. This is just another reminder about how much fun it has been to do armchair planetary geology through the rover's eyes.

I was mucking about with experimenting with stacking and stitching some images from the latest batch, and, somehow, this came out... not entirely sure how, but I just thought it looked rather striking, so sharing it here...

Click to view attachment

Nice

Love how the extra details in the "hills" are starting to come out.

The Pancam L2 view on Sol 2563.

Jan van Driel

Click to view attachment

Nice pan! And here's a match to a HiRISE image. The hoped-for long drive was lost, but there should be a drive today.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Just briefly going back to my image of the "hills on the horizon", I came across a rather great coincidence. Stella and I went camping on Sunday, to a beautiful nearby lake called Ullswater, and as soon as we had set up camp I started taking pictures, as you do. Breathtaking view from our tent, right across the lake to the hills and mountains beyond...

...and (if I've read it correctly!) checking the always-useful MER filename decoder I found that the images I used to make my "hills on the horizon" pic were taken at just before 3pm on Sunday, Earth time, at exactly the same time I was taking my pics of Ullswater.

Hence, just for fun and novelty value...

Click to view attachment

Just liked the idea of it, that's all... me, sitting there, by my tent, taking pictures of faraway hills, while Oppy, sitting there in the middle of Meridiani, was doing exactly the same thing...

(colour version of Ullswater pic here )

Very nice juxtaposition Stu.

I remember camping in that vicinity in my student days - don't recall many opportunities to log on though...

Great choice of location, Stu.

Here's The Ullswater, a new measure of scale:



About the same length as Santa Maria to Endeavour!

Andy

That's why I love my mobile's net browsing capability. Sat on the lake shore, glass of red wine *there*, big bag of Butterkist popcorn **there**, and looking at new images of Mars as the Sun went down behind the fells, over ***there***...

Priceless.

I'll spare everyone the pictures of me, aged seven, paddling in Ullswater with a toy boat, but instead I will note that I think the "Ullswater" unit needs recalibrating. The lake is 7-9 miles long (from Wikipedia), and the distance from Santa Maria to Cape York is only about 3.5 miles.

Yeah- only half an Ullswater to go!

John

The horizon drop-off might be analogous though - Mars being a smaller ball etc etc.

Oh, hands up who wants to see *those*?

I want to know how many ulls you caught Stu.

Oh John - my bad. You're quite right. A factor of two got lost there: half an Ullswater it is!

(I blame rushing to get my borsch hotted up for Yuri's night here in Scotland.)

Andy

"ulls"?

You mean there are no ulls in Ullswater?

What was the reason of going back here?
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...12P1931L0M1.JPG

I like this one. Distant view of Santa Maria
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...XKP1777L0M1.JPG

Sometimes the easiest way to do a turn-for-comm is a simple arcing turn at the end of a drive.

You mean U(lls) turn?

Oh I did not realise that was Santa Maria.
It's quite far back now.

Navcam images just came down of a big crack that Opportunity passed back on sol 2561. Pretty cool, so here's a 360x90 equirectangular panorama in both left and anaglyph versions, plus QTVRs. In the QTVRs you can get a better sense that the cracks are straight.



QuickTime VR version (2.8MB)

Red-cyan anaglyph:



QuickTime VR version (4.2MB)

I always wondered what one of those fissures looked like up close. Very cool to see in 3D!

I like it! Very cool to see how some of terrain on the sides looks like it cracked and slumped into the "gap". Love it. It's like we were back at Anatolia (sheds tear from eye) again...

A circular reprojection of the very nice pan by mhoward. This was a mid-drive sequence, not one of the stopping places.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Here're some context images. The arrow points to the site where the mosaic was taken.

Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

Are these fractures associated with Endeavour, and if so, will they become more numerous in upcoming Sols?

Don't think so because Endeavour predates the bedrock.

predates the bedrock?

Yes, predates the bedrock! That is, the Meridiani Planum sedimentary rocks we've been driving over for all these years were deposited on top of the cratered terrain that Endeavour is part of. The fractured rocks are the local bedrock, Endeavour is much older.

Phil

Rover driver Scott Maxwell was - as ever - kind enough to answer some emailed "Endeavour here we come!" questions for my blog, which I think many of you will find interesting:

http://roadtoendeavour.wordpress.com/2011/...more-from-scott

Absolutely!

On a different topic, and answering my question "why there was no actual driving on monday/tuesday, as planned?":