139m according to the tracking data.

Hecla Crater:

Endeavour on sol 2424:

Intrepid Crater from the other side:

You can see (I think) in the red profile the same thing I had convinced myself from the MOLA data: That we are currently on a flattish section with a drop-off to Santa Maria a few hundred meters ahead. I think this is why we can't see Santa Maria yet.

I made a prediction to Stu by PM earlier this week regarding this: That I expected Santa Maria to pop into view quite suddenly and dramatically ~400m ahead, since then we have covered around half that distance. So keep your eyes pealed over the next few drives, I'm anticipating a HOAV moment very soon.

James

Congratulations to JAXA on another amazing chapter of the Hayabusa story.



I seem to remember reading somewhere a while back that the other container was considered to be more likely to contain bits of Itokawa.

My version of the Intrepid Crater mosaic.



James

Yes there are jpeg artifacts - but so what? The purpose of the image is to show Oppy's current position, that is more than clear enough.

The map is downscaled from the full HiRISE image so it is not really the best thing to look at in detail, artifacts or no artifacts. If you want to look closely at the terrain then do as Tesheiner posted previously and look at it in GE. Then you get the full 25cm resolution.

Remember that the map gets posted time and time again and in the end this takes a lot of space that has to be hosted/backed up, so making the file sizes bigger is not desirable.

Nice comparison Stu. So Santa Maria is kind of Duck Bay sized, that helps me visualise it a lot, thanks.

Here is the full resolution HiRISE image from here to Santa Maria with my ripple map colour overlay showing all the features we have to encounter. It looks like the very flattest bit (greenest on my map) is just ahead. Lots of the parking lot intact has very small ripples, craters, Anatolia like features, more bedrock, etc. Doesn't look like we'll get bored!


Click image for size options.

James

At the bottom right of Tesh's map you can see the start of the parking lot. Just 300ish meters away!

The clock has just ticked past midnight and so sol 2400 has begun. As no driving is planned tosol I'll post the update to my large scale 100 sol (hectosol? ) route map now.

As was mentioned a few days ago the progress over the last 100 sols has been fantastic. Almost exactly half the distance to Santa Maria has been covered since sol 2300 and the 'parking lot' is now very close.


Both images link to the same blog post with links to larger versions.

James

Sol 2379 drive direction mosaic:



James

I may (or may not) have a chance to set my scripts running to make the image tiles for Emily tonight. Has the decision been made if we want to stick with the current overlap, have no overlap or a smaller one? Any of these just as easy for me.

I still have them on my disk, in fact they were still on my web server until last week when I deleted them to make way for the new ones, doh! When I get the chance I'll dig them out.

James

A fantastic drive direction mosaic came down from sols 2369 & 2370. Tracks, ripples, nearby and distant pavement, (possibly) another meteorite and the 'twin peaks' on the north rim of Endeavour. What more could you want?

Well spotted. Looks like the image was rotated for a more dramatic effect. Busted!

I agree, it looks like a far rim feature to me and matches the heading of a suitable looking one. I think Santa Maria should appear further to the right, close to the left end of the large range of far rim peaks (4-5) degrees to the right of that feature.

My version of the Solander Point mosaic of Endeavour from yestersol.

Sol 2358 drive direction mosaic - Oppy should be setting off across all the lovely bedrock in this scene tosol (2361)




James

They can be either, and can be even during the sols drive. Normally images like the navcam and drive direction mosaics are taken after a drive however sometimes they are be taken on the next sol if there is not enough time on the drive sol.

Use: http://www.greuti.ch/oppy/html/filenames_ltst.htm to decode the image filenames with will give you the local time that they were taken (LTST). Drives are usually in the early afternoon so post drive imaging will normally be around 15h - 16h.

Sol 2353 Drive Direction Mosaic



James

I was just working on it.





Both images link to the same page.

James

No, no reason I didn't look close to the edges where I hadn't stacked any images. There will be more images to add there when i get the chance which to make things clearer so I didn't look at that bit too closely, especially as it was getting late last night.

Here is a another one of my reprojections of the orbital HRSC image to match vertically with the pancams from our current location. The drive directions from 2348 & 2349 have been stacked to bring out details missing in the individual jpg's.

Version with lots of matching feature guide lines:



Unlabelled version:


James