Heh heh. The sixties live on. Here's one looking east.

You mean Oppy is now on a psychodelic trips these days ?
After eight years of working alone in the wide meridiani place I think that's just necessary.

Looks like Pear Blossom Highway!

From the report...



There was a small dust cleaning! It happened over a couple of sols. I should reiterate "small" -- it was significant but not enough to, say, let us drive away.

-m

If I read dilo's graph right, it looks like about a 10% gain. From ~275 to ~310 Whrs. Below is a compressed version. The full graph is here.
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Here is the interim result of a software test to re-focus the close-in hardware on OPPY, and to leave the rest of the image alone. I used a modified Lucy-Richardson 'focuser' and an out-of-focus 'finder (low freq regions and [when i had to] an explicit don't bother this region tool...
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How to account for the bare stripe in between the two dusty stripes?
Is it -

a. an illusion due to light effects,
b. indicative of dust-laden breezes arriving from two different prevailing directions
c. due to a change in rover orientation with a constant wind direction
d. due to a tendency of dust deposits to fall away when they reach a certain thickness.

Someone knows the answer to this, I am sure.

At first I thought the bright stripe running down just right of centre was specularly reflected sun/skylight shining through dust. But the L2 seems to show the (specular) reflected light confined to near the top. So it looks like the stripes are due to different thicknesses of dust.

Dust tends to accumulate slowly and come off fast, during gusts. So I'd guess the dust accumulated from many directions, giving smooth coverage, but was removed in certain stripes depending on the rover orientation during the gusts.

But a lot of dust was deposited during the dust storm, so there may be a depositional stripe associated with that too. Maybe someone could put together a montage of LGA images through the years...

Close-up from Sol 2887:

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Another lovely low-Sun sequence coming down:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...2M1.JPG?sol2888

Some nice views of Opportunity's deck on Sol 2886.

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While I'm catching up on the Greeley Panorama right now, I just had to stitch together that Gorgeous sequence of lowlight images on Sol-2888.

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A colour (L257) view from Sol 2884.
I don't do colour often, so this is a bit of an experiment.

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Here is a version of the Greeley Panorama taken through the L2 Filter to show the current progress of downlinked images. I hope they can do another rover deck pan at this location so it can be stitched together with this panorama.

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We're trying for another one of those "spot Oppy's shadow on the hill's shadow in the distance" shots. It's a real eye-grabber for public outreach. The previous one had misaligned shadows, etc. that made it less cool.

-m

Very cool. I'm sure we could count the intentional, purely "outreach" shots on the fingers of one hand. Are there other reasons for that sequence - science, planning, ...?

I can personally attest to this being true!

I don't think that a stage-managed version without joins will be an improvement in any sense, let alone more cool. What's wanted on these occasions is the first peek through the curtain, all the better for being rough-and-ready. I'm very happy to stick with this version: http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=182574

I meant cool that they're trying for "outreach" shots.

Changing gears, some news about future plans at Lenda's blog:

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now that is a really cool image. the double shadows make it look like there is a binary sun.

Some movement of the LF wheel. Flip between these images from 2894, 2899, and 2901:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...0M1.JPG?sol2894
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...0M1.JPG?sol2899
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...0M1.JPG?sol2901

Edit: According to the status update, it sounds like the move between 2894 and 2899 was unintentional. But the move from 2899 to 2901 might have had to do with the diagnostics on 2901. We'll find out more soon I'm sure...

From the Mission status update:
" Imagery from the front hazard-avoidance camera showed that the left-front wheel apparently dropped by a small amount, roughly half an inch (1 centimeter), sometime between Sol 2894 and Sol 2899. The rover is safe, healthy and stable. There is no indication of risk to Opportunity. But the small drop in the left-front wheel is curious. The IDD safety stall may be related. The project is investigating this."

Maybe back away from the edge?

Here is flick between 2894 and 2899
Besides the IDD, the only thing that moves is the left wheel...(slip?)
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"Mount Ada" I believe...

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May be nothing or just an illusion caused by shadows, but there seems to be some small soil/rock movement between Sol 2853 and 2901 from the right RHAZ cam. This is in the same timeframe as the drop by the left front wheel.

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I cannot see it, could you show exactly where, pls?

Yeah, we really don't know what happened. It got the RPs all excited when we told them we'd have a lot of diagnostic shifts coming up. Since the winter campaign started we've been releasing RPs early in the planning day for lack of energy to do IDD work. Now, plenty of chances to play around with Oppy!

Kudos to the RPs that noticed this. We saw it in our attitude measurement too; very close to the noise floor (our ability to even detect such a movement). But it definitely happened.

Interestingly, this amount of movement matters for the radio science experiments. Even the very small HGA movements (~millimeters) over the 30 minutes of a radio science tracking pass are highly visible in the doppler data that the scientists are using; the residuals around the predicted doppler shift for a perfectly non-wobbly planet are on the order less than 1mm/s, and the movement of the HGA clobbers this. They have to subtract away the effects with some models of HGA articulation.

Same thing goes for this small shift of the whole rover: it'll show up in the radio science data and they'll have to precisely get rid of its effect.

I'll leave that one up to the smart people to figure out.

-m

A not-so-stationary lander

I've marked the changes in this close up view.
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I'm now thinking that the lower one is simply a change of shadow on the ground cast by the rock but the one above still looks like a small shift.
Nothing else on the same feature moves in this way with the change of sun angle.
(has anyone got a pan- or nav- cam view of this rock?)

Just looking for something I guess...you know what we UMSF'ers are like

ok, Astro0, now I see it... personally, I tend to think is another game of light/shadows combined with complex rock structure (you can see similar illusions in other parts of the same rock) but I'm not sure. Deserves high res imagery!

I don't see any real change here.

Phil

I agree.

But keeners should compare pancam foreground shots over the sols we've been parked - we might see some soil changes due to wind. Here's a subtle example - a dark spot (with windstreaks?) appeared on the corner of the panels sometime before sol 2891:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...2M1.JPG?sol2891
It wasn't visible on 2811 - here's a comparison (same L5 filter, very similar lighting):
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"I'm ready for my close up now..."

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... reconstructed the bottom quarter of the image that was missing in the L7 frame (it cranked up the colors in the process....)
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I think the Greeley Panorama is finally finished.

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Edit: Flickr free membership doesn't allow large uploads.

And the Polar view...
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Maybe a whiff too green down in the bottom of the crater, but otherwise a lovely panorama!

Nice pan! Here's my different take on a polar panorama based on it (also de-greened it a bit)

Phil

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here is another in the latest series of the IDD
(auto-fixed flares/glints ... hmmm... needs more work)
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Here is another IDD image (march 29 - SOL2906)
This, I think, is usually the bottom of the IDD as it is stowed and used ...it appears to be pretty clean....

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Update on the LF wheel movement and explanation for the IDD imaging in the latest update:

Hmm. Curious.

Don't know anything about MER architecture at this level, but uncommanded automatic flight control movements on airplanes can be caused by a wide variety of things. One of these is a bad or noisy position feedback signal, and that's the first thing I'd check. Doesn't seem like there would be any other motion or position sensors feeding the control computer on the MERs that could cause something like this (there are LOTS of these for planes).

A more disturbing possiblity is that the servoamplifier's starting to go south. Presumably it would be easier to identify a noisy feedback sensor & use a software filter to mitigate the effects somewhat.

I'd've thought that a wheel performing a steering or driving movement without being commanded would be very unlikely, but I also know nothing about the architecture. My thinking was more along the lines of a bit of settling, maybe prompted by an IDD movement or even a wind gust. We are on a pretty good slope here. Maybe the LF wheel was perched on the edge of a miniature cliff, in an unstable position, and finally worked its way down?

I'd suspect a "bit of settling, too. I don't see any rotation of the wheel, but it is easy to imagine a weak rock fragment eventually failing under the load of the wheel over time; with or without encouragement.

Happy Martian solstice!

I'd say this is our current best theory. We rather facetiously suggested local meteor strike and Mars quake -- "just to be complete".

There are actually several other mysteries floating in and around the same time frame. For instance, that the apparent movement occurred near in time to a IDD joint stall seems significant, but we can find no mechanism (physical or otherwise) that could do such a thing. Certainly no one theory describes everything we've seen so far.

The problem is that when you're not expecting anomalies, you're not recording data or taking pictures every moment to document them!

We're now kicking ourselves in the foot for not recording our attitude as finely as we could haven when we stopped for the winter a few months ago. If we had done so, it would helped in the analyses that our downlink folks and RPs have been doing. Oh well. Still driving a car on Mars, still pretty cool.

-m


EDIT: Say, anybody got a blinking GIF of two hi-res front hazcams that show the apparent movement? I've got one from this side of the fence at JPL which I'm not allowed to use in my blog (have to pretend I'm a layman!)...

With the way the suspension works, can the middle wheel sinking push the front wheel down harder? Could it be the middle wheel that was precariously perched?