"Brett Lake'...

"Larder Lake"...

"Kinojevis"

Nice pair of rocks (names?).

A composite of the current pan plus names.

According to Scott Maxwell's Twitter site, the IDD will brush and APXS - mossbauer the site with a grind on friday. But later says their is a lively debate on getting on with moving.

If they use the limmited resource of the grind, I bet a mossbauer is likely. And with the time that would take would a large super pan or super res shot take place in light of the not so hot tau?

Also the grinder doesn't have many grinds left. If it quits could you use a turning wheel with the rover in place like they did early in the mission to partly decrust rock -without hurting the wheel or contaminating the rock with wheel stuff?

Monty.

Beautiful Pan von Jan! Now I understand the tilted perspective in NickF's clip.

Squyres put down a lien to get a super-resolution panorama of the entirety of Endeavour Crater, and it has taken the better part of a week to get it all done.

MiniTES - Bust

That rock was incredibly soft.

Or dust. Depends on how you see it. They do gamely keep checking it.

Opportunity is healthy and all* subsystems are nominal as of the Sol 2267 UHF downlink. Energy is currently 296 Whr with Tau at 0.370 and a dust factor of 0.5820 as of Sol 2267.

*except the Mini-Thermal Emission Spectrometer (MTES) which has experienced a failure. Investigations into the Mini-TES failure are ongoing.

[Mini-TES, the miniature Thermal Emission Spectrometer experienced an anomaly on Sol 2257 which is currently being investigated.]

*with the exception of a known problem with Mini-TES as of the Sol 2308 downlink.

Last Sunday, the rover's Sol 2700, the team decided to have the rover conduct another set of diagnostics on the miniature thermal emission spectrometer (Mini-TES) that began acting up last year and hasn't been working since. "We’re all about trying to exhaust even remotely likely possibilities," noted Nelson. Opportunity followed her commands to exercise the back-up laser and back-up optical switch.

Last year, after being turned on, the Mini-TES failed to conduct a transferring kind of "handshake" with the PMA. "It timed out, and then said it wasn't talking to the flight software, and it was also not properly commanding the motors that would have changed the PMA azimuth, and we got a PMA fault," Nelson recounted. The ensuing diagnostics indicated the PMA azimuth motor is fine, and the issue is likely between the Mini-TES and the motor control board.

This month, the Mini-TES exhibited more anomalous behavior. Specifically, it failed to draw power. A functioning Mini-TES should draw 200-250 milliamperes up to about ¼ amp, according to Nelson. "We're not seeing that current draw," he said.

That would seem to suggest that the Mini-TES is simply not turning on, or that something somewhere between the instrument and motor control board has failed. Although the instrument investigation is continuing, the Mini-TES remains, Nelson said, "effectively out of commission."

..... The outcrop is worn down just as flat as the surrounding Meridiani sandstones, so why wouldn't we expect it to be soft?