Vimeo says it's being converted - so another 45 mins to go. Call it 22:15 UT, then give it a ctrl-refresh

(update, Vimeo lies - it's taking for ever....just look at that URL every now and again . At some point, hopefully, there will be a video )

Not the best quality - but it'll have to do I'm afraid - it's converting at Vimeo now - should be ready in half an hour or so

http://vimeo.com/4361503

After a few sols of trying, they will get out of the problem and continue.

It happened at Tartarus, it happened after WH3, it happened on the way to McCool hill, it happened near Larry's Lookout, it happens again and again, it even happened at Purgatory and other places at Meridiani. Yet every time, they've got out.

So yeah - we know how it ends, it ends great. There is no just cause for pessimism.

No - The FL, RL and RR wheels steer. The middle wheels do not.

We've already heard that slip-checks only occur every 20m or so, so it's not hard to imagine the vehicle getting 'stuck', but driving for another 15m, and crabbing sideways as it continued to push against the front wheels which were no longer making progress.

You can almost hear it..

"Beeep...beeep...'Rover Reversing'...Beeep....beeep."

Very nice - I've always thought it would be fantastic to have old missions given the same CG treatment as MER and Phoenix. This is the first step on that road!

That's only fair if we don't get out in a Sol

But I like it

Next drive is already scheduled for today.

'The Spines'

Lead foot

An actual rover driver telling us there is one?

Building two MER's was an act of adding redundancy - and that redundancy extended to carrying a dedication to the sad loss of Columbia and her crew.

The Columbia/Challenger landing sites were names after they got there. Had Spirit not landed successfully, I strongly suspect Opportunity would have been the Columbia Memorial Station.

The HGA only points to the earth sometimes -it's not earth pointed all the time. However, to get this picture, the HGA has to point at the ground - something they don't tend to do very often and certainly not something that could be done whilst conducting downlink or uplink via HGA.

Your 'plastic stickers' comment (now edited to say Plaque rather than non space qualified plastic sticker) is a bit short of the mark. It's a plaque, not just stickers. And the fact that you see it on Mars now means that it HAS been flight qualified. It would not have been put on that vehicle without going thru a swathe of flight-readiness environmental tests.

I remember when Spirit landed and we saw a picture of it there, thinking "Hmm - I wonder if they'll avoid taking a picture of the one on Opportunity"

And unless I missed it (and I really don't think I would have) - I don't remember thinking "Oh - NOW they've taken a picture"

Obviously, it's an unusual orientation for the HGA to be in, so it would have to be done on purpose - but after a while, I was beginning to think that was intentional - something that I've since learnt isn't true.

So - fwiw - just from memory - I'm 99% sure that Opportunity has never imaged her Columbia plaque.

This is Dan Crotty's Calib version of Spirits Pancam observation of her HGA on Sol 2.

No commanded remote sensing, but downlinking of older data is occurring on the PCDB

Speaking of reboots - the raw image pipeline just flushed

On the raw image pages. There are, however, images on the ground, that the team can see. Probably just one of those 'give the server a kick' moments that happens from time to time in the raw JPG pipeline.

White works

That's what triggered me to post this

Something I learnt from Mark Sims (Beagle 2) last week. Beagle's parachute, which is the big clue I've been looking for in MOC and HiRISE imagery... was fairly transparent, and sort of beige.

40% - wow! That's got to be up around 500Whrs!

(512 according to the Article )

Yes. The pair are taken together. Dust Devil movies are usually taken with only one camera though - not both.

That's the joy of two 'eyes'. Any interesting feature can be corroborated with the other eye. In this case, just another CR hit - one of thousands in the mission so far.

Larrys Lookout, remember, we had 6 wheel drive - and that was a many-hundreds-of-metres zig zag.

At VB-we're looking at maybe 10-20m to zig-zag. If it were me trying - I'd just about circle the thing, then zig zag the best approach to the northern face.

It would be a miracle to get to that sort of location given her lack of mountain-goat ability. AND....late evening shadowing on the arrays....eek

Doug

So basically, it's Tim Parkers old Northern Hemisphere Ocean idea. I saw it mentioned in a few books, but the evidence wasn't water-tight at the time.