Nevertheless, if I were at Meridiani I'd scamper up to that high ground for a look around - it's probably the best view for km's (Endurance might even be visible from there).

Whats gone wrong and where?

Restricted sols and DSN congestion - we've only mentioned a few times The sort of constraints whereby targetted remote sensing and IDD work are the most efficient use of the rovers time.

SOL 939 showed up at the PC tracking site to be a SOL with RAT, APXS and MI stuff

Even more?...
...And may I ask why?...

Sol 931: Opportunity bumped to a rover arm target at Emma Dean

Still no grinding or APXS/MB/MI stuff has showed up at the PC site. They need at least a few days to do a grind and use the MI and the other spectrometers.

The Space Shuttle Atlantis is up and safe. What a great week to come. The Shuttle joins the International Space Station and Oppy gets to Victoria. Time to celebrate. Party at Jamescanvin place

Opps, I just missed your previous post.

While we are waiting for the final steps towards Victoria I did the following exercise trying to identify two far rim features (A and seen on sol 931 pancams with their counterparts on a MOC image. Yes, this has been already done by Pando (for , but I've got different results.

Comparing this identification with Pando's, there is a difference of just 2 degrees in the absolute heading of the feature I identified as B and the one identified by him (slightly to the NE). The problem is that if I rotate the polar projection and the heading lines by those 2 degrees counter-clockwise, the near rim features I used as reference don't match (specially the one to the right of and the pancam pointing information (taken from the PCDT web) would be off by those 2 degrees too.

We should know the "ground truth" in few days, hopefully after only one driving sol, but meanwhile I would like to know your comments.

EDIT: Actually, going back thru the messages for past few days, I would also like to credit jamescanvin who correctly identified it in this post very early after the images were down (which I missed while fiddling with the images myself).

Depressing possibility: If the fuel cell fails on-orbit prior to ISS rendezvous, would that mean that the truss assy would have to be jettisoned to do a safe landing in accordance with NASA's flight rules?

If a minimum-duration flight was declared early, the astronauts would still be able to dock with the station, attach the new solar array and stage at least one spacewalk to plug it into the station's power and cooling systems. After that, the crew would be ordered home early. But Hale said he believed the odds of that, while not zero, were acceptably low.

I think the near rim slopes down and away. Any sand would also migrate downward leaving the evaporite exposed. I think that could be the near rim. Barring that I'll settle for the far rim, but it's certainly not the interior dunes.