Yeah I wouldn't want to say for sure but maybe, just maybe...

Yup. We should be very close to 'Approach crater' now. Much more of Endeavour's interior should be visible and Cape York could well be peaking over the horizon. Haven't been this excited since the Victoria approach!

Note don't expect any pancams, none were planned tosol.

OK so when I said I didn't need to rush to do my own version I meant it. However for some inexplicable reason 40 minutes later I'm now posting one. I'm addicted!




James

Wow! Great work Stu, I guess I don't need to rush and do that one myself now.

I'm starting to get the impression that there maybe a rather large hole up ahead!

No, hazcams were posted after the drive yestersol as well as some older navcams.

Post drive navcams or pancams were scheduled for tosol instead (to enable longer drive time) so expect those sometime today.

Another significant drop in the local horizon tosol - not long now folks!

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...GFP2360L2M1.JPG
Compared to this just 80m back
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...00P2359R2M1.JPG

Hmm, possible I suppose, but my gut feeling is that Cape York won't appear so high against the far rim (i.e. we'll see a lot more of the far rim than we ever have before, before we see any of Cape York.) Too early to say for sure, tomorrows drive should tell us more about the location of that bump.

[quote name='Floyd' post='175401' date='Jul 11 2011, 03:15 PM']Could this have something to do with the drive fault?

Yeah, looks like the drive faulted after the turn back to the drive direction but before the wheels were straightened (apart from the RF which never turns of course). Hopefully something simple like a slip check fail and not an issue with a steering actuator (edit just catching up on Twitter and I see Scott talking about driving so I guess it wasn't anything serious )

Restricted sols, USA holiday, DSN problems, full flash. These things happen.

On a related note it looks like tosols drive faulted out - but only after near 150m of driving.

Ah so this is why I had a flurry of new followers over the weekend! I think I did mention it in passing here a week or two back, it is a reletively recent thing. I'm glad people find it useful it certainly helps keep me up to date with what Oppy is up to, something I was loosing track of before.

As for the drive that you were expecting that was planned to be at the end of the long weekend so that stuff planned in for the other days were at a known position. The drive should be happening right now...

And finally here is the Bingag Caves (?) mosaic looking back at the meteorite and the tracks into the distance.



James

The final bits of the latest colour mosaic of the rim have come down. Here it is:



James

I was just preparing a post and graphic to say the same thing as Fredk but I needn't bother now.

Sorry folks far rim for that one, we are going to have to wait till after some OMFFSM views of the far rim before we see Cape York IMO. At the moment our view of the far rim is pretty poor.

James

Indeed, that's a much nicer view than I was expecting. Shame there wasn't a pancam mosaic, but no time for that, Spirit Point beckons...

Yes, as Doug says the information is from the tracking site which is a massively useful resource (map making, MMB metadata, thumbnail images, planned sequences, etc.) and as such the last thing we want to do is overuse it hand have it closed off.

For those of you who don't know, over recent weeks I've started posting a daily tweet summarizing what Oppy is up to based largely on the tracking data. So even less reason for others to need to query the database themselves.

http://twitter.com/nivnac

James

Yes, they were taken (Don't expect anything spectacular though, a single colour pancan of a 'ray' and some navcams)

And yes, images like this always have a much lower priority, drive images are needed right away to plan the next drive, science ones can sometimes take weeks to make it down.

... But then tweeted later that the drive was off due to DSN problems

Gumdrop Crater


James

I believe that is what is referred to on 'teh internets' as FAIL!

Anyway, it's still worth stitching:

Skylab crater

Tom, I played around with rover quaternions years ago, I was never totally convinced I had got it working exactly right but comparing my code with the maths on calculator you posted I think you need to swap the last two elements over. Then you get numbers close to what I get from code I've used in the past to automatically generate panoramas with flat horizons.

heading -50.58337307972186 degrees
attitude 8.761900410435159 degrees
bank -17.565753444479686 degrees

I'm not sure what the -50 for heading refers to as Spirt was facing very close to north, I have only every been interested in the pitch (attitude) and roll (bank) numbers which are about right I think.

Looking at the stamps it looks like only 5 of the images were taken in colour the other 3 were just L2/R2. Looks like the colour bit covers all the actual crater though.

Here are the colour mosiacs taken of the Mercury Cluster.

Sigma 7


Friendship 7


Freedom 7


All images link to same blog entry

James

Who else

And done from 'on the road' as well.

I did some checking and my money is on Fredk. That crater is the best match for what we can see at the moment.

No official word, but yes I think the drive did fault out. As I posted on Twitter yesterday the post drive imagery was taken much earlier that usual and 'fault' images were taken which, while usually in the image schedule but not normally actually taken.

James