Minor pillars or dewatering pipes. In false colour they are subtle but present as bluish banding perpendicular to the laminations in some ejecta blocks. Their presemce was identified by Hortonhearawho on the yellow forum, who's imaging skills leave mine for dead, and I can't think of any other explanation.

...and off they go again, no stopping at Skylab. An incredible pace being kept. They will have travelled close to 30km by sol 2600! Is it wrong to hope that they don't encounter anything IDD-worthy between here and the area around Cape York?

I like new science as we discover it, but I also would like Oppy to start climbing the hills in September.
I suspect that there will be changes in the surface material as we get closer that should be examined and cataloged.

Soft-sediment deformation structures are very common in bedded/laminated terrestrial evaporites:

Castile Evaporite deformation structures

Bedded and laminated sedimentary salts and sulfates are easily deformed by gravitation (slumps on slopes and buoyancy/loading) and tectonic forces, especially when saturated.

I think these are similar early deformation features since the laminations below the folded bed in the rock are relatively undeformed.

Wow, we're already 300m past Skylab! Pedal to the metal or what..?

I would have liked a closer look at this strange little 'un...

Click to view attachment

...but in a couple of centuries someone will go grab it and take it to the Museum of Mars, and put it in a case with all Oppy's other "Weird Rocks", so never mind...

Just updated my blog with new images ( http://roadtoendeavour.wordpress.com/2011/...rizon-cape-york ) but there's a BIG post coming up later today I think many of you will find fascinating... just saying...

Edit: ok, here you go... Why are we going to Cape York? An interview with James Wray

I really thought she would slow down on these ripples..... but no way !

Thanks again, Stu. Some good context there.

As people have pointed out, we're now starting to enter a patch of ripples that will extend for about a kilometre. It's visible as the dark blue E-W streak in James Canvin's ripple map.

Judging from the orbital images, the worst of the ripples ahead are tiny compared with what we've been through already. Compare the new images with this one, from 2182:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...FNP1925R0M1.JPG
Incredible that we managed to find our way through that Sea of Dunes, eh?

Thanks, I learned a lot from that. - I love your little interviews with the scientists, keep at it!

So should we expect arrival sometime in August? Or does it make sense to start estimating arrival dates?

Really, it makes NO sense trying to guess an arrival time, too many variables and unknowns. Personally I don't know why people keep trying.

As my mum used to shout at me from the front of the car, 'we'll get there when we get there!'

Not sure how you can mean that. On long trips, I can usually estimate the times pretty accurately--within 10% say. They've been driving the rover long enough I'd expect them to be able to make pretty accurate estimates by now. They ARE scientists, after all.

With no unforeseen circumstances, sure. But unforeseen circumstances are one of the hallmarks of the mission.

They *are* scientists, yes, well spotted. The difference between their trip and your trip is that while you set off on your trip focussed solely on getting from A to B, as quickly or effeciently as possible, which makes calculating an ETA pretty easy, the MER guys are travelling from A to B via a rather ineffecient route, and expecting/hoping to have to make *unplanned* stops along the way for D,E, F, G etc when something unusual or shiny catches Oppy's eye, which makes calculating an arrival time absolutely impossible, and that's without factoring in enforced stops for technical reasons, holidays, environmental events, etc.. If the MER team was driving Oppy across flat, featureless desert, with absolutely nothing between them and Cape York, and they knew for a fact that Oppy's systems weren't going to change one bit, then yes, they could calculate an ETA based on an average of, say, 120m per sol, but that's not the way things are. There are known unknowns, and unknown unknowns up ahead, which is why I personallly don't think it's worth trying to predict Oppy's arrival date, but of course anyone can try, for fun, I'm all for that, just as long as they don't get disappointed or impatient when Oppy is still driving after the date they choose.

Also, arguing about different estimates is a waste of space on the forum!
Phil

FWIW, I am hearing consistent statements from various scientists & even an engineer or two that they expect Opportunity to arrive before MSL launches. They're being conservative of course. I suspect that's all you'll get anyone to say officially. But it's not stupid to draw a graph and extrapolate as most grade schoolers could do for themselves!

They're scientists, yes, but their predictions are only as good as the information they have. And there's lots of information they don't have!

They can't foresee a mechanical problem that causes them to sit in one spot for 3 months doing diagnostics. And they can't foresee spotting a chunk of phyllosilicate Endeavour rim ejecta a kilometre before reaching the rim, which they then study for 6 months.

Thanks Stu for this interview, it gives a lot of useful information.

OK, so we are all agreed that we will arrive in August--unless we don't! End of discussion

OK here's my tentative ID of two features in the view ahead. They're on the pancams but it's easier to point them out on this navcam view: http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...HDP0653L0M1.JPG

The pair of bright streaks below the distant hills on the right, looking rather like our first views of Santa Maria, are the crater which was my suggested candidate for Young Blocky. (Already proposed, but clearer now than when Phil did that extreme stretch.)

The bright horizontal line just below the horizon on the far left is part of the large bright degraded crater to the ENE of us now.

These are only guesses. Correction or confirmation would be equally welcome.

I was working on the route map right now. Since part of the process was to "match" the navcam mosaic to the background (HiRISE) it was also quite easy to add those two features to the process. Here's the result.
Click to view attachment

Oh, that's very nice Tesheiner! We could do with more like that now and again when we're groping around trying to make sense of the view. An excellent spinoff from your route map work.

Oooh, I like that! I like that a lot!

I like the latest MER report:
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/mission/status_...ll.html#sol2600



I know they havde found water on Mars, but this is maybe exaggerating a bit

Was the last drive cut short?

No official word, but yes I think the drive did fault out. As I posted on Twitter yesterday the post drive imagery was taken much earlier that usual and 'fault' images were taken which, while usually in the image schedule but not normally actually taken.

James

Nothing obvious in the stamps: No big rock, no large ripple, no visible slippage in the soil. Wonder what went wrong....

Will there be evidence near Endeavour Crater that the object that created it "splashed" into a body of water?

Is there a way to see evidence of a "splash" from MRO?

"Excessive" tilt is my guess.

Turns out, per marsroverdriver, that it was an excessive cosmic ray - flipped a bit in a FPGA.

My first post in almost 3 years. I lurk a lot.

My impression is that all we see of the original Endeavour Crater is what I have highlighted below -- the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The rest is covered by the Meridiani formation deposits. Not a lot to go on, but perhaps the fact that the rim seems to come to a sharp peak (in my view) is a hint -- of dry impact? Of course there are close to four billion years of weathering to take into account.
Click to view attachment

To amplify, from Scott: "Last drive cut short (~ 30m) by a very rare Single-Event Upset (SEU) -- a cosmic ray flipped a bit in the FPGAs. Oppy's OK & driving again."

It do happen.

Who needs an Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer? These rovers do it all.

There is a small crater on the southern end of Cape York that could be interesting, if Opportunity can reach it though. Also there is a "ledge" or "shelf" that surrounds the Cape that perhaps the rover could drive around on.

The apparent sharpness of the peaks could be a function of upturned rim for a simple crater with any ejecta overlay eroded away. Endeavour seems to pre-date the Meridiani sediments and would surface water (implied by the Noachian channels to the south) have really affected the crater shape resulting from an impact into basaltic bedrock? There doesn't seem to be much hard information available for Endeavour as a whole. Do we have any real idea how deep are the sediments that have over-run the NW rim?

The pipeline's back. The new pics include this shot of a little crater imaged during the 2600 drive:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...0M1.JPG?sol2600

I've been intrigued by a little feature on the horizon. You can see it in the latest pancam view:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...2M1.JPG?sol2603
Here's an average of the L and R frames from sol 2603, with a nearby crater, "A", and the horizon feature, "B", both marked:
Click to view attachment
I've identified crater A in the following orbital view:
Click to view attachment
I've also given a tentative ID for feature B, as a very distant crater. The relative lines of sight are correct between A and B. Still, there are a couple of other candidates for the horizon feature, marked C and D. I'm going with the distant crater, B, because it looks like it has more relief than C and D, and because the horizon feature looks very far away. I think B is what Stu called "Cape approach crater".

Anyway, this is very interesting, because as you can see, my candidate for B is getting pretty close to Cape York. I don't think the horizon feature actually is a part of CY, though, since I figure that the highest point on CY should be farther to the left.

Wow, that would be a heck of a thing, wouldn't it? If you're right (and you usually are!) that crater is on Cape York's dorstep. Actually, it's the newspaper left on Cape York's doorstep. Amazing.

( I've missed the past few days' developments, was on camping trip/SAS survival training in north Wales. NASA might meed to revise its claim that Neptune has the solar system's highest winds, I'm pretty sure our campsite beat them... )

There were no developments because we had no pictures, so your trip was perfectly timed in that respect at least. (Where were you camping? I've often driven past weatherbeaten camp sites in places like Capel Curig and felt sorry for the inhabitants. Next time ring me and you'll have welcoming roof, walls and coal fire.)

There is too much physical relief in "crator B" to be, in my estimation, the rim of a relatively small, distant crater. Therefore (and this is a big leap of faith), I think fredk has identified for us the first view of Cape York.... there, I said it. Let me be the first to congratulate fredk. (Alright, you can start shooting at me now.)

I did time it well then! We were just outside Rhoss on Sea, up a hill...somewhere... and it was a v short notice thing, so didn't want to ask for bed and board, but next time, for sure.

Hmmm... not at all sure... I think we've established that Cape York is below the local horizon, ineide the rim of Endeavour. But interesting, whatever it is.

I forgot to add that my horizon view above had 3x vertical stretch, so in reality the mystery horizon feature is quite a bit more subtle than it looks there.

Whatever it is, it's more or less in the direction we're headed, so it'll be a nice reference point in the drive-direction pancams in the weeks to come. Kind of a silhouetted "beacon", so to speak...

Crater rims (in my limited experience) have generally resembled a low, flat-topped, hill. This feature seems to have a couple of distinct "peaks". It's in the right direction (bearing in mind that there's a fair bit of angular drift in the IMU, something like a degree if I'm recalling correctly), and the intervening topography is not well mapped, so Occam's Razor is hinting at Cape York. That being said, I don't see any hint of the foreground line which would be indicative of something more distant poking above it, so let's call it a candidate.

Occam's Razor. There's a neat potential name for a landscape feature

Occam is rolling over in his grave. He never designed his razor to be used with caveats.

I did say it was "hinting" Let's call it a 52% probability; if I had more time on my hands I'd firm that up, but we'll know either way in a month or two.

Some craters do have a "peaked" appearance from afar, such as Santa Maria on our approach.

I checked one more measurement: Stu's "Cape approach crater" (my main B candidate) should appear about 0.5 degrees wide on 2603. That matches with the horizon feature.

As much as I'd like it to be CY - always nice to see your destination on the far horizon - naaah, not buying it. The peaks only stand out in the vertically stretched image, and we've already seen that 1) we're in a local dip, and 2) CY is almost inside Endeavour, on an inward-facing slope, so I just can't see how we can see anything of CY yet. As others have said, I don't think we'll see CY until we're almost falling over it.

I did some checking and my money is on Fredk. That crater is the best match for what we can see at the moment.

A little 'anaglysis' to support other methods, showing the last kilometer or so of Oppy's hypothetical remaining path to CY in 1/4 of the full size, with annotations at key points (lines approximate). It's likely that the southward rising high ground crossing the middle of the frame, also visible in pancam views, is obstructing our view to CY itself, although I would guess that there's only an (Occam's) razor-thin line separating our views of CY's crest and the bulge crest, given that the highest point of CY also seems to be the absolutely highest point in this anaglyph. It's perhaps noticeable that CY's highest point is not where you might expect it to be, i.e. the sharp-looking crests with shadows, but somewhat to the south of them (more clearly seen in a higher-res anaglyph). The 'Approach Crater' has a raised rim and is located only some hundreds of meters short of the bulge crest, so that's most probably what we see in the horizon.

Rough go at a mosaic of most recent pics...

http://twitpic.com/52u9z4/full