Neat!! Looks to me like the far upper right is the first good look at the black sand that many took for a black hole...

Wel, well - it seems the site is back up and working normally this morning!

But, is missing many pics...

Hopefully they will catch up with the badklog, and stay alive now...

Well, this is about the third or fourth day – if not more – that the website at http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/ fails to load.

Question is – is it just that the server is down, or has someone decided the traffic to the site has exceeded financial capabilities, or worse – that this information does not need to be provided to the public any longer?

If anyone has an explanation, I think many would be interested in the facts, if known...

I wrote my own, but it's not quite to my satisfaction (finished) - so if anyone knows where we can avail ourselves of said utility, by all means point the way

JPL says the rovers travel at 2 inches per second. That is:

120 inches or 10 feet per minute - 600 feet per hour.

or

50.8 millimeters per second, which is:

3.048 meters per minute - 182.88 per hour.

Considering that they have to scan the road ahead, convert every inch into data, then use that data to calculate for the presence of dangerous obstacles, and make adjustments to heading that will lead to the objective location, or halt, if they can't see such a path, these things are moving at blinding speed!

I hope you are BOTH right - but, James may have a point - there could be a rather sudden drop off that isn't quite so easy to see in these photos - yet...

It is possible that line he draws goes all the way across the pan... the big question is - is there any drop-off at all. What I'd like to see - is what does it look like further to the right...

There looks to be an easy and smooth descent to the floor of Gusev to the left, once down this 'step' - then a drive-around, to get back to home plate.

True, true... as you say, we just have to go along for the ride and see...

The immediate question we face (the 'steep step') won't be the only one coming up in this descent - from what I can see there's going to be several dicey points on the way to Home Plate. With a little luck, we can hopefully avoid the need to reverse our path! Wouldn't that be the pits!

Have a great one...

Ron

There could still be a drop-off ahead – but from the second image Doug posted, there DOES appear to be a way through, dead ahead. At a server that I have for a domain of mine, I’ve posted three cropped areas. The first from the first image Doug posted – the next two from image two.

Looking at the third ‘path down’ image, enlarged three times, it does appear that a diagonal line breaks through the dark ridge of what might be a drop-off. It is ‘underlined’ by a white line just to the right of it. Close up, it appears there is a way through here...

See http://anyold.com/mars for the three snips from Dougs photos.

Well - I forgot to mention the ten of thousands of tiny ones - a couple of feet in diameter, up 10-12 ft. - they spring up fast, often race a few feet and die. We call them whirlewinds - not dd's - they're the more of a pain to the outdoorsman than a marvel...

Re. size of dd’s on mars in relation to the size of on earth:

They are about the same, at least from 50 plus years of personal observation of a great many in the southern New Mexico desert. Recently I counted 20 simultaneous dd’s in an area well known for them, a brief description of dd’s seen at that location follows.

The majority average 10 to 12 meters in diameter and 200 to 300 meters high – often many very straight up into the sky, all of long duration (10 to 20 min,) and slow (8 to 16 kph) forward motion. But it is not uncommon to see several per day that are more than double those numbers, including height! I’ve seen many that reach more than 1000 meters, virtually straight up – life duration however much shorter.

This long-tall slow type exhibits life durations up to about 30 minutes – longest I’ve seen.

On rare occasions really big ones form, with a base diameter of 150 to 180 meters – but the column is not stove-pipe like, always being conical in shape, they often extend only 60 to 100 meters into the sky, they move fast and have a normally short duration of 1 to 5 minutes. Often the duration is less than 60 seconds.

All of the above are created strictly by convection heating, little to no storm-front influence needed.

I'm no expert - but, I've seen tens of thousands of them, always marveled at them, and been personally hit by hundreds of them out on the range.

No link to the 100% of Oct, 12?? I like the looks of that one!

Have a great vacation...