Let's try some prospectives.
I understand that they want to release Ingenuity ASAP on a as flat terrain as possible.
Experience also shows that they generally choose the easiest possible ride at the beginning of a mission.
So, my bet will be driving 850 m strait to the approx. 300 m diameter crater to the north-est which happen to be roughly half Victoria crater diameter but of the same deep (750 m - 75 m deep).
This will both be the best chance to study outcrops from Jezero floor as well as a very scenic copter flight.
My 2c as usual but why not keeping the fun at this stage ?
Dying waiting for tonight conference...

As promised, first version of the map of planned traverse. It's based on the map presented yesterday by Phil (couldn't find original reference so far) and covers traverse up to sol 850.
This track is 63 km long and goes all the way to the Una Vallis which it means there will be a lot of driving ahead (Opportunity covered 23.796 km so far).
I guess they will first go around the dune field to reach starting point of this track, but this is of course pure speculation.

Click to view attachment

I found a video from JPL from Dec. 2018 called "Mars 2020 Landing Site: Jezero Crater Flyover" which I found interesting for two reasons:

1. The "landing site" is pretty close to what actually happened.

2. It shows the rover moving directly through the rough area. Would they risk moving the rover through rough terrain and sand dunes? Maybe they didn't have enough high resolution images of the area yet?

Click to view attachment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnZ_sidmr4Y

Anyway, it's probably just a curious coincidence.

I think you mean Curiosity has covered 24 km. Opportunity went about twice that.

I'm eager to see what possibilities exist for "remote" sensing (about 5-50 meters) when Perseverance approaches the edge of the delta deposits. SuperCam has a laser that can be aimed a few meters away. Will they be able to / choose to approach the steep slope of the delta deposits close enough to examine those layers? Obviously, we'll see them from MastCam. We will soon be looking right at some of the most interesting materials for which the landing site was chosen, but they could turn out to be just a little out of reach for now. The meter and sub-meter morphology of the edge of the delta deposits will be interesting to see as soon as those first panoramas come back.

I noticed that Phil's "Extended Mission" map shows a more extensive drive on top of the delta, that I hope will be closer to the actual track

Yes, thanks for correcting me...I meant Curiosity of course...

This is old version of the track...refered to as western landing option...Note that landing ellipse is 2018 workshop version, not the final one.

Wow indeed.

Here we go! Fresh from the conference..

High res image from MRO:
https://www.uahirise.org/releases/persevera...scent-large.jpg

Spectacular, truly!

And a new avatar at last.

From today's press conference, a *very* quick-and-dirty color adjustment of a screenshot showing a color image from one of the hazcams:

Click to view attachment

Lots more detail on the SE rim in the new FHAZ frame. And I think we can now see the hill to the east (arrowed):
Click to view attachment

Here is an undistorted version of that I just whipped up in Photoshop, plus a selective contrast adjustment to show that distant hill.

In many ways, this looks like the Huygens landing site. And in some ways it is – just east of an upslope feature from which fluid flowed in this direction. However, the history here should have involved much, much more reworking after the last fluid flowed, while the Huygens site is still almost certainly still being reworked by rain and flowing liquid.

The MRO image from the press conference showed the landing site slightly more west than the actual landing location. Not a huge deal but it's an interesting discrepancy.

im surprised skycrane flew northwest towards the delta, i figured it would go east.

I was curious how steep the near delta slopes are and the answer is not very, ranging from 15 to 27 degrees:
Click to view attachment
15 degrees even sounds drivable, though of course the proposed route to the south is less steep and slope isn't the only factor in choosing a route.

Anyway, it's for sure not fair to call them "cliffs".

Can you imagine all of this with MastCamZ ?

If the skycrane portion has left-over fuel, could it take off again, and image some more terrain?
Maybe this would steal some of the thunder from the helicopter, but it's a disposable asset...

My attempt at color corrections, contrast, vingette, sharpening and crop. A cylindrical projection version is also attached.

Impossible. It was violently destroyed on impact.... and cannot relay data without the umbilical. Everything was downloaded on touchdown or else lost forever.

I was looking at the great image FredK just posted and couldn't visualise what 15deg etc looked like, so I came across this on the net and thought it might help others as well.




Click to view attachment

The raw images page is still showing only the first three images sent yesterday. Do we know if that page will be updated as soon as images come down? What is the image policy for this mission?

One of the speakers at the recent press conference said the new images would be uploaded to the Raw Images public webste "fairly soon", but I did not detect any urgency about it.

Didn't we used to have a swear jar?

It's going to be a long weekend until Monday's press conference, and I'd be surprised if they released any raw images before then.

I'm not sure about the skycrane being violently destroyed on impact. It burns its fuel until depletion, so no explosion, just breakup. But I'm curious as to what speed it might have had on impact with 25% of fuel reserves remaining and no rover weight. I believe the reason they didn't want to look at the skycrane for Curiosity was fear of residual fuel that is highly corrosive.

those rocks with holes in them

What sort of process does that? I dont remember ever seeing anything like that at Gale Crater

Really hoping the team looks at those first.

Usually that's due to 'evaporites' that form on dry lake beds, the salt crystals get mixed in with sand or clay, then when the rock is exposed to water the salts dissolve away leaving voids. You often see that texture in 'caliche' or 'natural cement' that forms in desert regions.

Thanks man! Fascinating none the less. Don't recall seeing that at Gale

From watching the recent press conference, I recall one of the science team was asked about the porous nature of the rocks near the rover wheels.

Her answer IIRC was that if they are volcanic basaltic rocks, then the holes (wrong term) are caused by the venting of gasses during cooling, and that if the rocks are sedimentary, the the same holes are produced from the interaction with chemically enriched water.

I would have suspected it to travel much further away than it did if it was programmed to fly in a line until it emptied the tank, but so much for intuition maybe that was similar to Curiosity skycrane distance travelled with the simple impact dust plume being much bigger and further away than it seems, but hopefully this time its closer to the proposed path to do some imaging if ITAR concerns aren't prohibitive, seems it would be valuable from an engineering perspective given the effort put into the suite of forensic tools for the EDL sequence.

Personally, if I were looking ahead to entry into this, or other atmospheres in the future, I would love to learn as much as is possible about the performance of the heatshield.

The rocks with holes remind me of Viking 2 (see figure 4a,4b): https://www.polartrec.com/files/members/jac...et._al_2011.pdf

I was also wondering what the cost/risk would be for future missions to include some rudimentary scientific and comms hardware on the skycrane, to be used in the event that there was remaining fuel. (Though on reflection I'm not certain what the benefit would be: given the high resolution imagery available from the orbiters, would an instrumented skycrane give us anything of significant extra value to the mission?)

Also, I can understand the reluctance to mess with a system whose main objective at touchdown has to be to get as far away, as safely and quickly as possible, from the rover.

Adding extra complexity to something like Skycrane is how you end up being asked difficult questions when an expensive mission fails.

Skycrane also, at the moment the rover is detached, is in the dead center of an area we have already imaged on the way down.

Throwing away a piece of hardware that could be used as a stationary lander with a seismometer and weather station is maddening, but it would take the weight away from the rover and they do want to keep some fuel margins. Exo Mars will have a functioning lander after rover deployment. I'm not sure about Tianwen-1 lander but I doubt it will be functioning independently.

The bubbles in volcanic rocks are called vesicles. As scalbers pointed out, lots were seen at Viking 2's site. Also found on the Moon and of course right here. The crater floor may include volcanic rocks which are high priority samples for dating.

Phil

Newbie here. Does the sky crane picture seem to be missing some blue?

Normally they are there straight away, but it's pretty obvious right now they are withholding images for the press conferences, which in my opinion is quite disappointing.

Also maybe to get less compressed versions before release. The image policy will be the same as we are used to, just give it a bit of time to set it all up. The page can't be just a copy of MSL because there are so many different cameras. It is probably all set up offline while they check it with real data.

Phil

In regards to the color, I'd expect the PDS images when they are released to show better color correction and fidelity.

It does not do this. See Mars Science Laboratory Flyaway Guidance, Navigation, and Control System Design. Behçet Açıkmeşe et.al.

The bridle umbilical device (BUD) has built-in retraction
springs to retract the now free bridles away from the rover top deck.
Once the flyaway controller on the DS assumes control, it first
holds the current altitude for 600 ms to allow sufficient time for the
umbilical to be cut. After the requisite hold time, the thrusters throttle
up and the DS ascends vertically for a predetermined amount of time.
Then, the DS begins to execute a turn to approximately 50 deg pitch.
The DS holds this attitude with the thrusters at 60% for 4 s. The hold,
ascent, and turn take place within 2 s, which corresponds to a total
flyaway time of 6 s


There is fuel and high pressure gas still onboard when this is finished. Flyaway consumes ~20-22kg of fuel. M2020 had ~90kg of fuel remaining so there were ~70kg of fuel left on the descent stage at burnout.

To burn to depletion would be to risk an explosive event at fuel exhaustion causing a debris field the rover would be well within.

https://static.uahirise.org/images/2012/det...028401_1755.jpg < The crime scene of the MSL descent stage impact. Note the explosive nature of the scar.

The descent stage doesn't have a proper flight computer. It doesn't have it's own communications. It doesn't have it's own power generation. It doesn't have its own instruments. It doesn't have landing gear. It doesn't have enough fuel to land anyway.

This is a big discussion we all had in this place 8+ years ago. The descent stage is not a missed opportunity for a lander.

Best I can do at the moment - I think these are the approximate fields of view of the hazcams (early version with covers on). The outlines only show he near field, the view extends beyond them. A large rock to the southeast is visible to the lower right of my SE-facing outline. The SE view doesn't match as well as the NW view, maybe I should have them closer together or my placing is a bit off.

Phil

Also... arising out of a point made at the recent press conference, the Hazcam images are big and can be cropped so only part is transmitted. This shows how the wheel image fits on the wider view.

Phil

Click to view attachment

I think the full frame is actually the whole frame from Front Left - and the wheel subframe is from the Front Right.

Thanks for the clarification. The NASA landing simulation stated it burns the remaining fuel.

The press release images seem to be full-resolution pngs, so that's not bad in the meantime.

With a 136 deg fov and 5120 full-res horizontal pixels (which the wheel shot is a subsample of), these hazcams will give us pretty decent one-shot colour panoramas!

The two FHAZ views are clearly with different cameras, probably L vs R (as opposed to A vs B), but there is some overlap:
Click to view attachment
I'll leave colour matching to the pros.

This also means we can make the first anaglyph from Jezero. First parallel-eyed:
Click to view attachment
And anaglyph:
Click to view attachment

Edit: scooped on the inset by Phil!

Circular version of the nice cylindrical projection posted earlier today by MarT. A 'circular' version in my terminology is a polar projection, except that the radial scale is modified to shrink the foreground and expand the distant scene.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Doug is (of course) right about the pics being from the left and right cameras - that's why in my version the wheel frame is skewed to match the other image.

Phil

interesting, they even went to the trouble of clarifying the apparent mistake by "..crashes into the terrain with no remaining fuel"

There must be good reason why an emptied fuel tank poses enough an explosion hazard they take measures to avoid, but seems counterintuitive, any explanation?