I wonder if it's a deliberate decision to try to get there before Curiosity lands, maybe for operational reasons? Or even propaganda purposes - a nice huge pano of Endeavor would make a great lead-in to the landing.

coughahemphyllosilicatescoughahem

What?

Get there ASAP is the charge. Getting to phyllosilicates before MSL is a great motivator

News tweeded by Scott Maxwell about the current data backlog:

Shoot, still not enough data cleared off of Opportunity to permit driving. Working to fix. Will resume Wednesday, it looks like.

(In other news, new images have finally appeared in the Exploratorium)

And there are a couple of bright spots visible in the middle distance which I think are close to where we expect Santa Maria to appear. I didn't expect to see it yet so I won't be surprised if it's not.
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...W8P2420R2M1.JPG

Couldn't resist a quick stitch and colour of these pancams from Sol 2383 before work Too addictive!!

And have to add the 'mighty mountains' - well...... crop of crater rims stretched

Not exactly where I was expecting but very close - I think this is our best bet yet. Let's keep an eye on it...

Thinking about my golf shot comment, a couple of quick searches eddicated me as follows:

Endeavour is about 22km across, while the average golf course is 6km in length. Gravity on Mars is about a third of its force on Earth, so when we get to the western edge, one might imagine playing a round of Martian golf to get to the ultimate 18th hole!

Would these bright spots along the crater rim be frost? dust? a different rock layer?

Exposed bedrock looks bright like that in L2/R2 (as you can see in the foreground of that same image).

In relating these latest views with the estimated contour map, it seems bang-on-the-money.
Hope some breezes do blow...

Like Doug said, it's all about the phyllosilicates. The plan is not to be an opening act for MSL , the plan is to scoop MSL!

I presume that the flash is now completely filled with rear hazcam images taken for use by the autonav software?

It seems a shame not to download these rear hazcam images because they could be used to create nice driving movies. The dunes are currently perpendicular to the direction of travel, which would give a good sense of movement.

The only recent sol for which all of the rear hazcam images seem to have been downloaded is sol 2358. I wonder if downlink time could be made available to download a few more sol's hazcam movies. I remember long ago when Oppy first landed that many impressive drive movies were created. However, I have not seen any new movies recently.

I understand that Mars and the Earth will be on opposite sides of the solar system early next year and so for two weeks communication with Mars will be impossible? I also understand that Oppy uploads low priority photos when it is given nothing else to do. I wonder if Oppy will upload all of its low priority rear hazcam images to MRO during these two weeks without further intervention?

(Edit: Last paragraph changed to use the correct terminology)

It's not Earth-Mars distance that defines MER downlink budgets. It's the quality of the UHF pass to MRO/MODY which changes from Sol to Sol (a good pass, 150Mbits. a bad pass, <50 )

The reason to downlink those recent ones was to establish, on the ground, if RHAZ would have enough things to look out to start being used for AutoNav again rather than the Maxwell-Shuffle with Navcam.