Let me guess a bunch, of luckless college interns are going to be tasked with manually taking an inventory of grain sizes so the test bed team can recreate a terrestrial analog to this particle mixture?

I believe that what you are referring to the rear wheels are in fact the middle wheels. The right left is behind the left middle (on the right side on the mosaic).

Paolo

How do you know? ;-) The shovels are ready! Paolo

Getting away from the mobility situation for a moment, there was a stunning DD sequence on sol 1919:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...DQP2288L2M1.JPG
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...DQP2288L5M1.JPG
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...DQP2288L7M2.JPG
It shows a pair of what must be gargantuan devils, since they appear to be past the horizon - I can't see any bright parts in front of the ground, just the dark silhouettes against the sky.

I think with some stretching they will be there. Something that large over the horizon would have to be several KM's across.

I've stretched and stretched and squinted and can't see any hint of devils in the foreground.

But I'd say these devils are not much more than a few hundred metres across. We're something like 20 metres above the plains (see these contour maps). On Mars that means the horizon should be around 11 or 12 km away (assuming level plains). If you look at views of Grissom Hill and the big crater in behind it such as this one, the horizon looks closer in distance to Grissom, which is maybe 8 km away. At that distance the largest of these devils (just under 2 degrees across) would be around 270 metres across, which is comparable to other large devils we've seen.

Of course the devils could be larger if they are farther. But they don't need to be kms across.

Hmm, on my computer screen I can clearly see them extended into the foreground.

You didn't include this one, which was taken just a few minutes later pointing just to the right: http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/...DQP2288L2M1.JPG. Not a dust devil there, more like a wind front. No wonder the deck is clean!

Do we have some pics of the clean deck shot recentely?

For fredk's set of 3 images, it would appear there are 4 DDs, 2 moving in tandem to the left (S), 1 indeterminate, and 1 moving faster. There is nothing in front of the horizon at the <1% level in the, uh, "good" images. So I'd buy them as a couple 300-m class DDs with a couple smaller ones.

there's a small one in the latest PS update (from s1907)
http://www.planetary.org/news/2009/0531_Ma...ate_Spirit.html

hard to believe that's our girl ...forgot the panels were any colour but red


edit: lots of wind in the latest batch of NavCams

ie: http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/na...DNP1561L0M1.JPG
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/na...DQP1561L0M1.JPG

Q: are all of those 256x1024 images "DD watchers"

here's my attempt at cleaning up http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/mi...DQP2906M2M2.JPG


Larger rez image here (but best viewed at 30-50% zoom)
http://sidfishes.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=93

Good sequence for animation here. Is someone doing it?

This is a quick version of part of the sequence.
Needs lots of work and I've squeezed it up for 16:9 to show the scene.
Stretches the view a bit (but that happens on UMSF! )
 DD_palooza.wmv ( 1.9MB ) Number of downloads: 1215

The P1561s are all fast dust devil movies (p1560 are "regular" movies, but haven't been used much lately, and WATCH has been used little if at all recently). We deleted a batch of the movies that have no dust devils a bit ago, so there was some selection bias to having dust devils, although the most recent ones hadn't been vetted. These go back as far as 1888. Spirit's quite deep into flash to be transmitting those. BTW, last I saw of the deck, the body and wing panels were pretty clean but the rear panel was quite dirty. But there've been more events since the pan.