Panorama from 677
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Confirmed!

Here is a quick navcam panorama looking forward. Clear route to Mogollon AND tosol (742) is planned as another driving sol.

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Let me light some fireworks. It's celebration time!

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Now the traffic numbers justify the money spent on the NASA websites.

Jamescanvin: "All the Gibson pan images taken on Sol 748 are all down"

I grabbed the image and tried to do a contrast-stretch and color enhancement on it to bring out the color variety between bands. A lot of the brightest rock surfaces are saturated white and have lost detail in the green band. Red and blue channels are ok.

I've often wondered what constellation we might be in as viewed from say, Sirius or Alpha Centuri.

Doug

Spirit Key Dates:
If the current dust deposition rate holds (~0.08% power loss per sol) Spirit's normal power generating capability will drop below 300whr per sol on Sol 865 (June 9th) and stay below that until Sol 997 (October 22). Those power levels effectively eliminate any significant mobility unless she has a very favourable location.
The worst period is from sol 919 to Sol 943 when power will be no more than 275whr per Sol unless she is oriented towards the Sun.

All L7 pancams taken on sol 749 too i.e. looking left and slightly upwards.
Here is a preview at 1/4 size (just "copy & paste" on autostitch).

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PS: James, that missing frame is a real mess for us working with B&W.

I'm curious if the arm is snapped off and wires get "crossed" can they isolate the system so it isn't a constant power drain..
oh the worries we have for the rovers even though they should have died a LONG time ago..oops..hope I didn't jinx them..
jb

Eagle Crater was the HP of Meridiani.
If they have the ability to adjust the current to just one motor in the complex arm, then my guess is yes, they have the ability to isolate any circuit.

Yes, I know. This is a tricky pan which is stretching my software to breaking point. I'm working on a much more advanced version which should help a lot.

Even then - it's not too hard for me to regenerate the pan with streched colours from the outset which would always be better than trying to stretch the final version. If people would like this I can do one tomorrow (Oz time, about 15 hours from now)

Cheers,

James

Jamescanvin: "All the Gibson pan images taken on Sol 748 are all down"

I grabbed the image and tried to do a contrast-stretch and color enhancement on it to bring out the color variety between bands. A lot of the brightest rock surfaces are saturated white and have lost detail in the green band. Red and blue channels are ok.

And here's a more interesting question -- how many of us here on UMSF have actually *used* a slide rule in their lives?

You could also design and test a centrifugal artificial-gravity module within ISS operations, and I don't see anyone even mentioning the concept. Seems to me it would be cheaper and easier to check out how well such things work at the ISS than it would be to just design one and fly it, untested, as part of the first major manned interplanetary expedition.

Not to mention that we have no idea how much gravity is really needed to eliminate the medical problems of microgravity. This is impossible to test on Earth but could be tested on animals in quite a small artificial-gravity module.

data from the Pancam Tracking Database.

I've overhauled my solar power estimate charts with the most recent power generation information. I've also properly reworked the calculated data in these charts to include an accurate model of the available insolation for each rover and also included an estimated value that factors in the effects of Tau using the values published in the MER Analyst Notebook.

Hmmh - mebbe I'm not a typically average human but my eyes are only about 10cm\4 inches from the top of my head. And I'm 5'11. 6" seems a bit on the high side.

How tall are the MERs exactly with the Pancams up?

The simulations that have been run with an unstowed arm involve a single wheel sideslipping off a rock and free-falling some distance. This scenario isn't too unlikely, even when driving slowly. And Doug is right, the "suspension" is very hard so the rover and arm get a good jolt when that happens. The worst thing is that the unstowed arm gets thrown sideways as well.

The arm design was highly optimized to stay within a very tight mass budget (~4 kg for the arm, and the instrument package is ~2 kg). Because of those constraints, the arm was never designed to take these kinds of loads. A single-wheel drop off a 3-centimeter rock edge gets pretty close to the documented capability of the arm when in the hover-stow position.

Something else to remember is that the joint 1 winding failure was almost certainly caused by thermal cycling (remember the stuck heater on Oppy's shoulder). So the expectation is that the joint will fail completely from a thermal cycle, not from operation. So for longer drives, where they can't see the terrain in advance, it is considered fairly safe to stow the arm before driving and then unstow after the drive. (Of course, there's still the occasional stall because it's tricky operating the motor with a broken winding.)

Hope this helps explain the logic behind what they are doing.