Last year, MER team decided to let Oppy go into Endurance because the value of the potential science gain outweighed the risks to the rover at that time. I remember Steve Squyres saying something like...if Oppy can't get back out, it would be like getting locked in a candy store.

I wonder if the same would be true when we get to Erebus and Victoria. If these craters show something significantly different than we've already seen, and there's a feasible entry/exit route, would they still risk sending Oppy in?

If it were me, given the 18 month extended mission and the rover showing its age more and more, any target in Erebus or Victora would need to be very juicy. Then again, there's no guarantee that Oppy will live for the entire extension.

Hmmm...depending on what we find when we get there, it could be a hard decision for the team to make!

First of all I don't think you can go into Erebus, it's looks like just a rim of very old crater that has been filled up.

About risking sending Oppy into Victoria it will depend on if there is other targets in the near vicinity that Oppy has a chance of reaching.

From the orbiter images, it appears they would not want to venture toward the middle of Erubis, but there is little reason to do so. I am guessing this large, eroded crater will have many places where Opportunity can venture across the rim with little risk.

I say go in Victoria if there is good science there. I doubt there would be much left in oppry by the time she reaches that crater. I hope i'm wrong but its a very harsh place.

scott

If Victoria craters' inclines are anything like Endurance I suspect that any trip in would be a one way trip. With the front wheel being gimpy still (as far as we know) they will be a little more limitted in what they can do to combat any slippage. They can still get some help from it of course, but it will hardly be optimal.

Besides the orbital shots I've seen of Victoria seem to hint at a larger amount of exposed rock around the crater rim and immediately inside it than at endurance, it may mean we will be unable to enter in the first place.

Agreed on the surrounding terrain. However, assuming that can be crossed, http://www.thirteenthcentury.com/victoria.jpg highlights one area ("B") where there may be an even more gentle slope in than the average for this crater. Even if access to the bottom isn't possible (and the 60m-wide dunes might be too intimidating to make it "worth it") there looks like places where exposed rock in the rim could be well worth investigating from high up the sides of Victoria.

Personally, if Opportunity croaks around about here, and all I get to see are panoramas of Victoria over the next few months, I'll be happy.

Andy G

Yup - down the entry ramp at B would make sense to me - I'll try and fudge a 3d image of what I think it may be a bit like - but I wouldnt go much further in that that - as that would be death wish.

Doug

My impression from the Victoria image is that even going from A to B might be downslope, and if the terrain is just sand ..... I don't know.
I do not want to be pessimistic, but I think going inside Victoria is out of the question.
Even just panoramas though (From A or around the rim) will be breathtaking

If they were prepared to enter Endurance with no g'tee of getting out - I think the same would be very much true of Victoria - especially if MiniTES is actually dead by that stage.

Doug

A is the entry point. B & C are bounce marks as Oppy comes to rest (D) wheel-side up on the crater floor.

For me, the question is: given Oppy's age and gimpiness, if you didn't go into Victoria, then what else could you do of equal science value for the rest of the rover's lifetime?

You couldn't assume that you could go very far in any one direction before a breakdown. Do you just set off in a direction that has interesting looking stuff along the way (the "enjoy the journey" philosophy), or do you aim for another distant landmark (the "go for the goal" philosophy)?

Which way would you go?

A lap around Victoria? That would be something like 2.5km on its own

Doug

Assuming we're talking about an immobile rover (a "nover"? ;-) ) then what could be better than a final position high on the rim of Victoria, taking wide angle pancam shots that could be stuck together to make an animated day?

Forget the science at the end of the science mission, just inspire the public that Mars is not just some reddish dot in the sky, often lost in streetlamp glare, that it's not just a sink-hole for billions of dollars; but that it's a real place with 24-hour days, one we can (and should) walk on, a place of breathtaking vistas and beautiful real estate...

Hmmm...I'd go tomorrow. :-D

Andy G

A little more info from Steve Squyres: http://athena1.cornell.edu/news/mubss/

April 18, 2005

We're starting to plan our attack on Erebus crater. It's complicated a little bit by the fact that Erebus is actually nested inside an even larger crater that we've named Terra Nova. Terra Nova is very old and subdued in its topography, so it probably doesn't expose a lot of stratigraphy. The current plan is that we'll hit Erebus somewhere along its northern rim, take a big panorama, and then decide what to do in detail... similar to what we did when we first arrived at Endurance crater. It'd be nice to plan it in detail now, but we simply need to learn more before we can do that.

Looking at the highest resolution MOC pic<s> of Victoria Crater, I do not think there is any possibility of exploring the deep interior of the crater. It appears to mostly be sand sheets and dunes.

However, what's worth exploring is the stratigraphic record and geology of the sulfate rocks exposed in the upper walls of the crater. I'm not at all sure there's much more exposed than in Endurance, but I think they can go a ways down in to that "access ramp" notch on the north west side of Victoria and poke around there for quite a bit without getting into the steep part of the crater slopes or the sand trap.

The other thing they can do is go to one side of notches and take systematic color and MiniTES <if it's working> data on rocks exposed on the other sides of the notches.

I think we're getting a little ahead of ourselves here, Opportunity has to reach Victoria Crater first, something I don't think will be easy. I'd be elated if Opportuntiy made it to Victoria and sent back a nice panoroma of it.

Well Spirit was able to drag itself part of the way up the Columbia Hills with one wheel not doing anything, and that's pretty rough terrain. Opportunity is in much sandier terrain, so it might dig itself in if it tried the exact same thing. However, it seems that the right front wheel can still move. It's just not directed the right way. So they could possibly drive backwards, with the wheel spinning, but just program the rover to make occasional course corrections, as they did with Spirit.

Are we ever going to get an update on any progress (or lack of it even) on that bum wheel actuator?

I agree - it should be a wonderful set of images should Oppy make it, and I've got my fingers crossed.

Semi-related, I've gotten frustrated trying to find MSSS images taken of Oppy's environs at www.msss.com. Their page for the MER missions seems incomplete, as I've seen images posted in these forums that aren't there. That leaves me poking around in the date-based galleries, which I find is hit-or-miss, given my limited knowledge of what passes happend when.

I know we don't have detailed coverage for the entire Oppy area, but it sure would be nice for a "mapquest" style interface to browse around the images we do have.

Or am I just missing something? How do you guys find your orbital images?

Thanks for any help...

If it would be of any help I have made an overview on my site of rover's location orbital imagery. There is more data for Spirit indeed. There is a lotta stuff from Odyssey however I need to check up on too.
Nico

Yes - it's a great help. Thanks a lot!

http://moc.rlproject.com/end_vic_4m.jpg goes some of the way

Doug

I wonder what's going on on Mars. Squires gave a piddly little update about dust devils in Gusev. But, we really don't know a thing for the past week or so.

They're taking lots of pictures with pancam of Methuselah to decide which spot to take a close look at. No idea what's happening with Opportunity - we will have to wait for the latest images to be posted.

Things sure have got quiet around here since the exploratorium stopped posting pictures.

Oppy is moving south, slowly but surely. They are looking at some software issues though so not much science is being done until that can be sorted out...

Oppy where are you!???

Haven't seen any hazcam pics for a week now



Can you elaborate on that software issue?? Something with the driving commands?

That's a strange coincidence, didnt Spirit also have some software problems recently too?

My guess would be that they're doing some tweaks to account for the stuck steering actuator. Maybe they had Oppy do a donut to see how the motion system behaved, and are making adjustments to get better performance

It would take NOTHING for someone at JPL to post a few paragraphs per day about that's actually happening with each rover.

FRUSTRATING!!!

After 15 months, I'd have thought everyone would have got over the fact that stuff will just appear as and when it does and theres nothing we can really do

Doug

Thanks pando for this information !

It's a relief for two reasons: we are moving at all and the mars-to-earth
communications seems to be intact !
Thats the most importat thing.

Hoping for a detailed update soon ..

It's simply not true that "it would take NOTHING for someone at JPL to post a few paragraphs per day about that's actually happening..." It takes time, it takes effort... and we are operating deep within an extended mission where money and staff are cut to the bone with constant pressure to make do with even less. Everybody is overworked. If one person is off sick, or on vacation, or just given another higher priority task to complete on a short deadline, then lower priority jobs just get put off. Let's be realistic about this.

Phil

Picture update at JPL, 538 new pictures: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportunity.html

Opportunity hasn't moved though - they had the IDD out on sol 443. It's parked in front of a very large dune/drift...... lots of berries still on the ground .

I'm a slow typist. It takes me a few minutes to type out a few paragraphs.

There are many paragraphs written PER DAY documenting just about everything that goes on with the rovers. And I mean EVERYTHING. To see some summaries of that just browse the MER Analyst's Notebook to see some of that data generated. There are detailed reports and minutes from each SOWG meeting, sol planning and execution summaries, daily and weekly mission manager reports, etc, etc. Many emails are going back and forth between the scientists and the rover engineers; they are sharing an incredible amount of detailed data in the computer networks between JPL and the universities, on and on and on. Most of that data is just raw numbers, which are mostly meaningless for most of us mere mortals.

You have to remember that this is a government agency responsible for a billion-dollar mission, and the primary objective is to generate as much data as can possibly be generated as long as those little machines keep on working. Technically, all the things you ask for - detailed daily maps or status reports generated by scientists actually exist in a very raw, technical, form, which are not ready for general public consumption. Would you be able to understand a report that says something like "ARB/ACM faults clear, PMA az/cam el/mtes nom, S/C att coarse, DP in Flash (D-3305) 4096, Pre ODY PCAM cal target P1424123 04, MTES_NAIF_SCLK: MTES SCLK = 1/05243365663.091..."??! Probably not.

So, before it gets released to the public, it must be toned down, summarized, etc, so the public can understand what they are actually talking about. Any news that gets posted by JPL is technically a press release, and before it's posted to any official JPL website, it must be cleared through their PR department and get proper approval. Normally that takes time. Also, associated with any press release is a flood of questions from all corners of the globe from other press agencies, and they have to be prepared to handle all that and answer those questions. I don’t think scientists themselves have the authority or the clearance to post the mission reports themselves in some open website out there, nor do they have the time to summarize extremely technical data for general public every day. They have to juggle between the rover operations, analyzing the data, their schedule in their university and with their students, etc., and that's tough work.

When there is no news for a while, there usually is a reason, and the simplest reason is that there is no additional information available to anyone! We’re talking about a piece of hardware 100 million miles away. So if there is a slight problem with something on the rover, it’s just that -- a problem. Of course we all want to know immediately what the problem is, what it affects, etc. The thing is that they want to know all that as well, but they can’t until the proper personnel is actually available to analyze it, communicate with the rover, run tests and try them out here in the sandbox, and that is not instantaneous. So, often what you see in the news a week later is a report that also has the answer along with it, after many hours of work analyzing that problem and finding some kind of conclusion.

Overall though I think JPL (compared to others such as ESA) has been quite responsive to the public in posting reports of the rovers. Dr. Steve Squyres himself offered to post weekly news at the Athena website and I think this is an incredibly generous gesture from him to satisfy the curiosity and interest for us Mars fanatics who continue to be so obsessed with the MER mission. Let’s be very thankful for what we have here, and how much we actually know, without which there wouldn’t be such a large fan base for those two incredible little machines.

I hope I cleared up some things for ya...

New update from Squyres on the athena website. Oppy sure is unlucky these days:

"After yestersol's drive, all six wheels we're dug pretty deeply into a large ripple. We've gotten dug in before and gotten out just fine, so this isn't cause for immediate concern. But we're likely to be here a little while, taking our time to get our wheels back on top of the soil again"

Damn!





Hope he is right about it not being a concern

Yikes.....I don't think i've seen the wheels on either of the rovers so deeple entrenched in the soil.

Also...while trying to move, they may have sunk slightly deeper:

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...DGP1223L0M1.JPG

Let us all pray this is not gonna be Oppys final resting place

Suddenly Victoria seems so far away

Erebus seems far away right now....whats going to make getting out of the sand even more tricky is the inability to turn the right front wheel.

Funny thing is that it was able to plow that much into the dune without the slip-o-meter kicking in.

When Squyres said they had dug in before, is he then talking about on the road to Burns Cliff in Endurance Crater?

Pando,

Thanks for the dose of reality.

oh, oh .... that's going to be tough with only 5 working wheels and software problems

if only we could reach the etched terrain, which seems to be only a few hundred meters away: from what is known from the orbiter images, that terrain
would probably offer gaps of rocky, more driveable floor between the dunes

a few weeks ago I was already concerned when spirit got stuck with the front wheel on its way up the hill:
http://mitglied.lycos.de/user73289/misc/sp..._f453_wheel.jpg
Spirit got free aparently with now great effort ... but this time it does look
worse ...

But I think with 5 (independantly moveable ?) wheels and the
combined brainpower of the JPL team I'm hoping this is not the end of the drive
... hoping for a little bit more scenic final resting place

RE: images in Reply#37. Interesting how the soil is cohesive and clings to the tread of the wheels. I wonder if this is not the "last gasp" of the Blueberry soil unit before it thins to the etched terrain. The physical appearance of the soil has been changing as Oppy heads south.

What is the exact nature of the steering motor problem? Is the motor/gearbox seized, is the motor not responding to commands, does the wheel not lock into the commanded position, or what? The descriptions of the malfunction, as I recall, have been general.

--Bill

When they command it to move the motor simply stalls, just as if something was obstructing it. I seem to recall that they could get some small movement out of it when they were diagnosing the problem though. But I would believe they are not gonna move it now since it is in the "least worse" position for driving.

Oh, wow. This doesn't bode well for Opportunity. If I am reading those CAD drawings of the rover construction properly, it could very well be high-centered over the crest of that dune it was climbing. If part or all of the weight of the rover is being supported by the underbelly of the vehicle, it will be very tricky to get get out of this location.

Luckily we have one heck of a smart team operating the rovers, and they have previous experiences that are somewhat similar.

I don't know what they should try next, but it appears the dune is only getting higher toward the south, so my best guess is to try to back out.

One observation from the hazcams has me perplexed, though. The front hazcam, which was looking toward the rear in this reverse drive, shows that Oppy was struggling for a meter or more to get into it's current position.

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...DGP1223L0M1.JPG

Shouldn't the software have detected a problem, and stopped before pushing itself into this position?

Squyres' status report for April 17 says that Oppy is in the etched terrain and that the large ripples were a sign of it. Wouldn't the rover be able to back straight out by driving on its existing tracks? If they get it unstuck, would they possibly try to drive in between the crests of the dunes to keep it on solid ground? And how would it alter their driving path to Erebus?

On a different note, it appears that Opportunity has made some good progress toward Erebus. If I had to guess, I'd say it covered about half the remaining distance since the steering problem occurred.

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...DIP2407L2M1.JPG

I think I can almost make out some outcrop ledges in that image.

I am not concerned. The rover has the capability to go on. It is not stuck. You drive back 8m and try the dune at a different angle. Remember exiting Eagle crater.

I'm not so sure, that oppy has moved much farther south - Viking and Voyager are still very well visible - http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...DIP1893R0M1.JPG
There is not much differences in the navcam pictures since april 19th, so I think, that oppy is standing still, while the MiniTES related reset is being investigated.