There's no such thing - JPL doesnt see fit to publish anything like that - Alan linked to his latest guestimate a few posts ago

Essentially - just north of the twin small craters at the edge of the etched terrain

Doug

Not sure I understand the problem - I just use 16.6 for pancam and 45 for Navcam - the other info ( sensor size, focal length etc ) are just ways to come to a degree value

Doug

Change maps
Up until now - we have been plotitng our position on this image


http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/r10_r15/im...5/R1502302.html

but the big drives of the last week mean its time to turn over and use THIS sheet

http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/r10_r15/im...5/R1500822.html



Sadly - still nothing cproto of Victoria itself - I hope we'll see that in the next MSSS image release which I think is imminant

Doug

I have quite a bit of the Larrys Lookout pan - but not the interesting part looking at Ten.Val.

Doug

Frankly - it should have been closed all the time - it was quite worrying that we could snoop around the APXS and Mossbauer data 6 months ahead of time.

Sols 180 - 270 are due in a month anyway

Doug

Looks like the special URL's for RAD images ahead of release have been shutdown

Doug

I love it when a spacecraft gets to KSC - the ammount of pictures they take of it is extraordinary

Doug

I think we'll see a dedicated dust devil imaging campaign soon - in which ever filter best shows them - images every 10 seconds or so for a few minutes.

Doug

These are all calibration images - and the auto-stretch that gets dumped onto all images going on the JPL or Exploratorium webpages makes them look like hell - when in actual fact they're little more than a few slightly off-black pixels.

Doug

Looks just like the fore-shortening of looking at a track over a crest.

Doug

Is the smallest Atlas V much cheaper than the top notch single-core one that NH is using?

Perhaps scope to be a secondary payload on a Atlas V / Delta IV Heavy / Ariane 5 (swop the student dust-counter mass/volume/data budget for an instrument of european origin in exchange for a launch vehicle)
Doug

Looks like we're getting quite close to the V-twins now..

They are almost line asturn in the first image

http://qt.exploratorium.edu:16080/mars/opp...23P2392L2M1.JPG

http://qt.exploratorium.edu:16080/mars/opp...23P2392L2M1.JPG

Odd filter choice for end-of-drive imaging, usually it's L7+R1 3 x 1 in the drive direction.

things look particularly exciting in the first image looking toward Albert

Doug

Ahh - good 'ol Shake and Bake.

I saw the flight structure for a comm sat undergo a launch simulation shake about 7 years ago. Astonishing noise - the sort of noise that you can feel in oyur stomach. How such precise delicate machines can be designed to withstand extremes of acceleration, heat and pressue is one of the miracles of modern science.

Doug

Yes - that 3d model they've generated of Endurance is fantastic - a VRML or other 3d format of that would be fantastic to render up in different lighting conditions etc.

For the same reason I yearn to have a 3d model of the Columbia Hills - a 3d model of Endurance would be a fantastic way to show the route Opportuinty took within the crater, and understand the terrain, the slopes and the targets it visited in there.

Doug

Thats a cracking image - there's a bit more in the mosaic as well - I think it's actually 5 x 2 in L257. When the rad's are up - I'll sort something out, I really like it.

Doug

Spirit did this once near Middle Ground - shuffle back and forward quite a lot. It saw a big rock and got scared.

Perhaps Oppy is identifying the ridge of each dune as a hazard of sorts.

Doug

Dont look at me - I havnt got a clue

Doug

I wonder if it might make sense - if they get much bigger - to direct blind-drives straight down the middle of these - to save the effort of clambering across them.

Perhaps they could drive accurately enough to drive on the western side of a dune - so as to give a favourable western tilt during the afternoon for better solar power - and then shift that to the other side at the end of the drive for a better power budget the following morning

Doug

I guess this is what made Sojourner so 'cute'. We could actually see it driving around with Justin Maki's 'rover movies'.

I so desperately want to see a 1 x 1 x 456 pancam image taken from about 10m away from Spirit - hell - even if it was just a pancam unit on a little platform that could be dropped by the rover, and a cable reeled out. Sadly - it would be of no scientific value and a waste of resources.

Who knows - perhaps one of the MSL's will land in Meridiani and might image Opportunity from afar. MRO might help a bit - a few colour pixels of rover will be nice.

One day - an astronaut - probable one of our children, will walk on mars and see Sojourner and Pathfinder - and perhaps bring Sojourner home.

Doug

testing attachments

Well - it helps that Simon is Space Daily So he posted a link to his own image and then used it on his own site

Doug

Told you we might drop a few posts on the way in the move.... it's a bit slow at the moment but that should improve





Doug

Nope - that is as big as it gets. They were 1024 x 1024 obviosuly, but that's simply a crop from that - there's just black around the outside

I actually resized it 200% to better align the channels, then resize back down to the size you see there - but that's all there is imagesize wize.

Doug

If they ARE V'n'V then we're about 50m away - and have covered hundreds and hundreds of metres in the past 3 odd sols

Doug

But it can be seen 36 seconds earlier

http://qt.exploratorium.edu:16080/mars/spi...B3P1956L0M1.JPG

If they really did a couple of images at 36s intervals ( something I was actually thinking of earlier - do 1024 x 128 images every 30s for 30 minutes one afternoon. ) - we could actually have a devil movie here

Doug