Probably:




James

No, I don't think so. I'll see what i can do when at home later, but I can't see anything in the raws.

It does look like we can now see part of the parking lot. My gut feeling is that Santa Maria is still below the near horizon (and that the bit of the parking lot we can see is beyond it) So I wouldn't be surprised to see it pop into view any sol now.

My understanding (and what I've meant when using it myself) is that the 'parking lot' is the smooth plain after the bedrock ahead. Essentially the large green region on the right of this map.

So this thread will cover the next ~2km east across the bedrock. Then, hopefully in the not too distant future, we'll start another for the 2km dash across the parking lot to Santa Maria.

James

I don't think so, the alignment of that feature is pretty close to the crater you originally pointed, your new one is a long way away from that. First thing to be wary of, is that that feature is very close to the edge of two frames in Damien's pan (hence why it is just off the edge of my image) so it's even more dangerous to use it for this type of work. While saying that, I did have a look at the raws last night when I was working on this to check and did see a bit of a dark smudge. However, there are many dark spots in my image, particularly near the peaks of hills. I think these are just indicating steeper slopes and don't generally show up well on the orbital image; I think this is what you are seeing here. I didn't see anything obvious for that feature when i had a quick look last night, and a glance across the left portion of my image shows how difficult it's going to be matching every feature we can now see.

I should note before anyone spends too much time looking at the image I posted, that I didn't reproject the orbital image for the current position but used the one I had from Conception. Hence it is not a perfect match and I think the orbital image should, to first order, be stretched slightly for a better match to account for us being slightly closer now. When I get the chance I'll start from scratch and make a more accurate/better version.

James

OK Stu, here is what I reckon.

First of all, when it comes to subtle features like these I find it best to stick with the greyscale images and preferably not use ones reprojected into a pan. Even better, it is the red channel which shows the relief better and happily we have two of those - L2 and R2, so they can be stacked.

I (obviously) agree with 'A' ("Monkhouse" ). 'B' looks good too. But I don't think you've got 'C', I think that crater is too far inside Endeavour to be seen (yet!) and I don't think it aligns quite either.

However you missed the clearest new feature - The little crater to the right and slightly further down the Endeavour crater wall is just peeking over the near horizon.

Here is the sol 2337 L2/R2 stacked and enhanced, with the new crater marked.


James

Emily: It should be Cape Tribulation rather than Cape Byron, Cape Byron is just visible in between Cape Tribulation and Cape Dromedary. You could also add Batavia which is visible on the left edge of Cape Trib.

Stu: But that would break with the tradition of naming craters after ships. I'd suggest 'Lord Sandwich' as Endeavour was renamed later in life (although this still breaks the naming rule as it wasn't used a a ship of exploration under that name)

For those that want to reminisce, as well as Scott's blog there is the UMSF thread from 5 years ago:

Sol581: Spirit Arrived!, ...on the summit of Husband hill

Those we incredible times. It was around that time that I first started to dabble in processing the raw images as well.

After seeing the first signs of the ripples changing recently, I thought it was time to dust off the ripple mapping and take a look at the terrain between here and Santa Maria.

Click image for larger images (1 & 2m/pixel) and some of my thoughts on the terrain ahead.



James

As Gordan noted that we are seeing practically opposite hemispheres, one of the first things to cross my mind was "In that case then where would Cassini have been in the Hubble shot?" After all they should be in fairly close alignment with Cassini behind Titan as viewed from the Earth. However a quick go with Celestia shows that space is big and they are not that aligned closely enough. If anyone else was wondering here is a Celestia screenshot:

Looks like ~76m by the tracking data - 70m blind 6-7m autonav.

Not quite the 20m of autonav we were expecting and it looks like only ~1.5 hours of driving not the 3 that Scott tweeted that they had. I look forward to news/images...

Just to clarify for anyone waiting on this drive. I think Scott was talking about 'today' as the planning day, the actual drive sol is 2322 which hasn't begun yet.

71m according to the tracking data. I don't see any signs of 'Maxwell motion' in the tracks - just a standard drive this time by the looks of it.

If your referring to the mark on the near horizon (as opposed to that distant crater beyond Endeavour) then my guess (without doing any complex analysis) is a particularly large ripple I can see in the maps in that direction about 700m away.

I don't see any sign of Cape York, although much of it would (I think) be off the edge of Ant's image.

Sol 2311 R21 drive direction:

Yeah, if I'm reading the tracking data right, about 20m blind then 10m reverse-auto. I can only imagine that it was an intentionally short first test. They probably wanted a good view of the terrain they were going to test the technique on, rather than doing it on entirely unknown ground (as envisaged eventually) on the first try.

Combining two of the Endeavour movie frames (2247 & 2289) with an effective baseline of about 3-400m some stereo can be seen. As there isn't that much detail for your eyes to lock onto (combined with the noise as well) it's a little hard to see, but Cape Trib definitely appears closer than Dromedary and Hicks and Iazu is in the background.

Click image


James

No, I don't think this bump is in quite the right place, it would line up with the very north 'shore' of Cape York the high points of the cape should appear further to the right. There are a few large ripples 3-500m along that azimuth, one or the other of those would be my guess as an id.

James

I feel like I'm danger of forgetting how to do MER image processing it's been so long since I've had any time to do any! Here is a very quick go at the sol 2300 drive direction mosaic to try and help me remember the procedure.



James

No, the limit of 70m is because that is the maximum distance they are comfortable doing a blind drive in this terrain, to do any further auto-nav is needed which up to now has required forward drives. It is these forward drives which are a problem for the wheel currents. This is why Scott is proposing this complex plan of backwards-autonav to go further without the rover drivers getting the images and checking that it's safe. When we are out into the 'parking-lot' terrain then it is possible they could push the blind drives a little further, but I doubt they'll be >100m

Some of Helvick's early posts in the old Whrs thread have a max power curve - for example here

Remember the days when we thought 400Whrs was needed to do anything, and rover death was at 290?

My large scale 100 sol route map updated for 2300.

Click images to enlarge.

..

Also posted, along with a bit more text on my website.

James

Which looks to be a carbon copy of yestersols. 70m ESE according to the tracking site.

Yup, and according to the tracking site it was another not unsurprising 70m ESE

And another one tosol (2300!)...

I'm pretty sure there are no cables that run along the underside of the WEB, we didn't hear anything about cable hazards during the extraction at Troy (where the underside MI pan you posted was taken).

I'm not sure which cables you are worried about in the first image. The ones in the bottom-centre that go up, across then back down again, are part of the lander rather than part of the rover. It's worth comparing that image with the 'empty nest' pan the same cables are sticking up on the left.


James

Wow, scrolling back along the route from Victoria is amazing both from the point of view of what Oppy has accomplished and the amount of work you've put into mapping all the hundreds of sites (knowing how much work goes into each one from the few times I've tried to fill in) Astonishing work Eduardo.

Great to see Santa Maria on the map - looks like some interesting terrain coming up as we head out into the 'parking lot'.

One suggestion: Could you make your grid lines a similar shade of gray as in the previous version? The white lines distract a little too much from the terrain underneath for my eye.