It's looks a lot like the terrain near/around the northen edge of the Erebus highway - hard work, but traverseable.

Doug

Because the effect is so small it's impossible to seperate it from the small forces that result from RCS's on more modern vehicles.

Doug

Everyone should have thought of the chances of another purgatory dune thing....that's why I said ( but it didn't really get noticed some months back ) S1k - because that seemed sensible if you included another 'get stuck' moment

Doug

In a brief 'still on holiday' pop-head-around-door

The RD180 is two exhausts, but one engine I believe.

Doug

He wasn't perfect, far from it....but one thing for which I think he deserves credit is going for two MERs.

Doug

Just a heads up, as of, err, about now-ish, Helen and I are off on a magical mystery tour....

Friday : York to give talk to York AS at 8pm
Sat : York to Sunderland to visit relatives.
Sun : Sunderland
Monday : Sunderland to Haltwhistle near Carlisle - Roman fort and Hadrians Wall
Tuesday : Haltwhistle to Kendal to meet Stu + Other half for dinner
Wednesday : Kendal to Coniston - Ruskin Museum and Bluebird Cafe ( I'm a closet Land and Water Speed record freak, so Coniston is something of a mecca )
Thursday : Animal Park in the Southern Lake District
Friday : Birkenhead (Helen's family)
Sat : That museum that Bob mentioned in Manchester
Sunday : Back to Leicester.

Unlikely to get online in the interim, so you're in Nico and my co-admin team's able hands

Doug

You're no stranger to mounding criticism onto the mission team...but you have zero justification for it this time around - at the very first opportunity they were backing out from it, and I am sure they'll continue to keep their foot in getting out as quickly as is wise, and it's only sensible to spend a few sols of remote-obs studying the resulting trench, and then move on. 10 sols all up perhaps.

Again, you have to be reminded...these are not hot-rods...these are geologists.


Doug

Of course, one could also put visidom slip checks into the catagory og 'internal measurement' - and those images rarely get downlinked

Doug

To be honest Akuo - it would take just as long to extract via sol by sol 'dumb' routines than it would to write the more intelligent routine

Doug

Any guess when the rovers will stop working?

I can't start thinking about one till the other happens.

Doug

Now we have proper data - we can see that there are differences - one could do things such as plotting graphs of brightness values all the way through the 12 full filters and see where the peaks and troughs are on specific wavelengths and then co-register those with potential minerals as seen in the TES library....proper science

There's nothing particularly odd about it all though - why shouldn't various different minerals appear in cobbles / gravels etc?

I'd have a go myself, but I'm off to York, Sunderland, Carlisle, Kendal, Coniston, Liverpool and Manchester starting tomorrow

Doug

Aghg - bad mental image...going to have to scour my retina again

Doug

It crashed

Doug

Every time the vehicle drives, the drive number increases. It's not related to distance at all.

After a significant drive, a new site number is declared and the drive number resets to zero.

Now - when you're doing mid-drive imaging (like visidom for slip check or documenting egress progress from a dune) - you have to drive...stop...take images...and drive again..and repeat. Each time you do that - you increase the drive number...

Thus yesterday's driving...
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...GBP1230L0M1.JPG
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...GCP1244L0M1.JPG
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...GDP1244L0M1.JPG
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...GEP1244L0M1.JPG
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...GFP1244L0M1.JPG
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...GGP1214L0M1.JPG

or, more briefly...
1F202400423EFF71GBP1230L0M1.JPG
1F202402217ESF71GCP1244L0M1.JPG
1F202402594ESF71GDP1244L0M1.JPG
1F202402957ESF71GEP1244L0M1.JPG
1F202403340ESF71GFP1244L0M1.JPG
1F202404009EFF71GGP1214L0M1.JPG

The day would have gone...

Take images at same place as yesterday Site 71, Drive GB..
Drive a bit, thus completing drive GC
take images
Drive a bit more, thus going to GD
take images
etc etc - up to GG

Tomorrow, we may see a similar increase, starting with GG for start of day image, then subframes of progress with GH, GI, GJ, GK, GL etc...

Doug

No - it really is just a drive number. Currently, because they use regular visidom slip checks, each instance of that will trigger a new site number - and I believe they do these every 6 or so metres..ish.

Of course, if you do a lot of tiny short drives with lots of imaging in an attempt to say, get out of a dune, then you'll crank up the drive number quite quickly. I think they may have done 4 intermedite imaging sequences and one end imaging sequence with the first drive-out-of-dune sequence, which would = an increase in drive number of 5.

It's not related to distance driven, just number of drives done.

Doug

Plenty of lessons learnt at purgatory - they know the routine

Doug

Odd - a drive number but seemingly without a drive.

Doug

See above That's Ted's work...

Really?

Load them both up and flick back and forth....there's motion

This is one image as a 'difference' of the other - the horizon has moved more than a little.

PERHAPS...here's a thought..it was a scheme to exercise the wheels, without actually moving anywhere, to minimise the risk of bad sticking when they come to use them properly in a few months time? I remember there being mention of motors having high currents when driving Oppy for the first time after the Olympia hiatus, probably due to the wheels getting a big 'draggy' after being parked for so long.

If they had powered each wheel in turn, just to give them a bit of exercise..they might not have moved, but they might have settled the rover a little?

Doug

Well - the left pancam is 135.3mm from the rotational axis of the PMA - so just by looking 180 degrees, it moves 27cm to one side. I don't think a 50cm bump would make much different for anything but the very near-field.

Doug

Ares Valles

Doug

It's worth a 'fram' look at. Quick scratch-n-sniff, pancam postcard...then onward.

If they're cunning (and they usually are) they'll 'mount' a small rock to get a nice solar tilt and do the flight software upload

Doug

Well - go for a very optimistic 250m/day, 1km every 4 days, perhaps 10km per month, 120km per year...1000km's is a very very long way

Doug

Yup - same here. I'm sure they'll be trying to fix it once it's office hours at the Exp.

Doug

Thinking out loud a bit....

make an MMB data folder on the laptop drive, copy any data you want across into it (keeping the same folder structure) and then tell MMB about the new data set by changing the paths in the edit-preferences menu, and then update->rebuild image indexes.... you could then do a update to check for new stuff to drop on top of the data you copied across from the external HDD, and it would keep that update just on the laptop HDD copy.

THEN.....to 'catch' any updates you had on the laptop, copy the stuff from the laptop back onto the external HDD ( overwriting things, but also putting the updates over as well ) - change the paths in the preferences back again, rebuild image indexes again (eek) and sanity is restored..ish.

I think.



Doug