I didn't get a chance to do anything this evening except for trying to use James Canvin's terrain map briefly. Posted the result below.

Cost function of (bad*bad + 3*medium + good) and grid dimension of 15x20 (not square I know )

-Ed

Science wins! Always does.

Nice work Mike. You have done some tremendous work in narrowing down the choice of routes. Once we get to this point, it is here is where 'eye balling the route' pays off.
However, if I may be able to express an opinion, I think a better refinement of this route is to trend more SW from the N end of your proposed route. This will put us are directly North of the pavement just W of the marked route.

This will give a nice bedrock highway to drive on, as well as an opportunity for science on any rocks or cobbles that we should happen upon.

Now everyone can play "Choose your own path"

I've put together coordinated terrain models in a Powerpoint presentation (both as .ppt 97-2003 and .pptx 2007 files).
I've also included little scale 50 m boxes drawn to cut/copy/paste to your hearts delight onto your favorite terrain model. Then group/copy/paste onto all the other models and the HiRise image as well.

Easy step-by-step instructions on Slide 2.
Scoring function table is included (Slide 10).

Powerpoint 97 (.ppt 25.7 Mb): http://www.speedyshare.com/371972901.html
Powerpoint 2007 (.pptx 25.2 Mb): http://www.speedyshare.com/666678727.html

Y'all have fun!

-Mike

(BTW: I'm really lovin' that cute little 50 m crater. It makes a great centerpoint for coordinating the images, too!)

Don't forget, JM, I was her first love! But I'm not the jealous type where craters are concerned.

The important thing is: Now the whole family can play along with the rocket scientists!
(We'll never know how many marriages you saved today, Mike.)

Regarding scientific 'points of interest', many cobbles of interest may be too small to resolve in HiRISE, but others can be detected: i.e.
1) Bigger cobbles - boulders, really.
2) Rubble fields left from the secondary impacts of local ejecta. (Some were seen on the trip south to Victoria.)
3) Areas of bedrock that are uplifted or undermined to expose fractured edges. (This often occurs around small craters.)
4) Any other abrupt visible transitions in the terrain that may reflect underlying geological discontinuities.

I expect that a spirit of compromise will resolve any dilemmas between geologists and NASCAR drivers.

Be careful with distances taken from HiRISE images, as a lot depends on the projection which was used (if the image is map aligned), basically you can't just take pixel-distances and multiply it with the scale. Scales might vary with the latitude of the image, depending on the projection type, and directions might also not be continuous across the image. Every projection-method has its own peculiarities.

In fact it is nice that oppy landed quite close to the equator, which make chart projections a bit easier and the resulting distance-errors smaller, at the Phoenix latitude you would have far more problems calculating distances. This is one of the reasons why I try to relate everything to latitude/longitude coordinates only.

It's quite true that scale and direction will vary across a map depending on the projection used, but for the minute area covered by one HiRISE image the variations are insignificant. The problem only really arises for images or mosaics covering a larger region.

Phil

Fully agree with you that with most projections the variations are very very small, but you never know with these rovers, by the time we start mapping the 100 km drive after Endeavour we have to take care

Haven't done much more but I decided to pack up what I have done and let people play with it.

At the following URL you can download a simple app that I have done to plot routes using red/blue/green terrain maps. I have included Mikes terrain map for convenience and to save using Doug's bandwidth

http://tinyurl.com/5k3tc8

It is an executable java JAR file so people should have no trouble hopefully. You will need java version 1.5 or greater though (safest would be 1.6).

When you run the JAR file just go File->Open Image.
Chose a terrain image like the one I provide for download. I designed it using RGB values (red = bad, green = good, blue = medium)

The constants used to indicate the cost of crossing a particular colour can be changed by entering the values on top
As discussed above:

The cost function is

If you change a value, be sure to hit the 'enter' key before moving on.
To indicate a start and end point just click on the map and hit 'Start' You can indicate as many points as you like. It just traverses from the first to the last. The size of the grid used to break up the terrain map can be adjusted from the 'Grid Location Size' menu. The estimator menu changes the method used for estimating the distance between points for the A* algorithm.

To clear all your points hit the 'Clear' button.

Finally you can save your maps using the 'Save Image' button. Just make sure you put in the full file name as a PNG image when saving, e.g myMap.png

That's it I think. If there are problems I'll do my best to change them at some point.

-Ed

Edit: Note there may be a bug in what I have distributed. The behaviour when all weights are 0 seems off.

Thanks jaredGalen, it runs perfectly under Linux... once I'd worked out that I had to click on the image a couple of times to define start and end points before hitting 'Start', if I wanted anything to happen, though. D'oh!

The temptation to try it out on absurd images is great, though. Hmmm, how DO you get to the bottom of Valles Marineris, anyway? ... *cough* ... also, I note that it throws "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space" on STDERR when given a ridiculously hi-res image, though that doesn't show up in the GUI.

Yeah, I guess good instructions were scarce in my post You need at least 2 points for it to work, start and end point.


And yep, java.lang.OutOfMemoryError can happen, I handle it wonderfully by ignoring it.
If the terminal is your favourite place then 'java -jar -Xmx1024m RoutePlanner.jar' is your friend, give it as much as you can and see how big an image it can take

All in all I didn't try and account for much user jiggery pokkery, so it will run into trouble. And also, I hate doing GUI stuff
Still haven't checked out my potential bug too

Thanks for sharing!

-Ed

Computer-generated route using directional STDEV, from position at sol 1687 to the point where Mike's SW route and W-spur routes join up with the others. This would require a turn to the southeast which as yet doesn't seem likely.



Total route with STDEV values for southerly course:



latest version (2) of my toolkit can be installed from here

Based on Eduardo Tesheiner's Opportunity Route Map of Sol 1687 (now solidly on all five UMSF Terrain models):

HiRise image with W Spur route (on left) and SW Passage route (on right) indicated:


Shift Differential Terrain Model with W Spur route (on left) and SW Passage route (indicated on right):


Looks like Oppy is headed toward the W Spur route entrance.

-Mike

All of the UMSF Terrain Models with Oppy's Sol 1687 position indicated:


(BTW, let me know what y'all think of this format - it's kind of a pain to put together.)
-Mike

The comparision is very informative Mike.

> Looks like Oppy is headed toward the W Spur route entrance.

Agree, although I have some discrepancies about the exact entrance point because there are some big ripples right there.