CAN'T WAIT for the other two panels in that drive direction pan to come down!!!

Gotta hand it to the Opportunity team, they're making it hard to turn away from a 7-year-old mission when we have shiny new things to pay attention to, like Dawn, Juno, GRAIL, and MSL

Yeah, I had changed my mind and deleted that part of my post just a couple of minutes after posting it. Initial excitement got the better of me.

Well when they work, they REALLY WORK, & I found out about my build error when I was in my late 50's during a successful life as an electronics engineer...
Mike

A wonderful shot today, with Iazu crater in the distance, Endeavor Crater showing itself more, and "Almost There" dune/crater. A deluge of mind-blowing images these days/sols, history in the making.

That's what I've been wondering? What constitutes an official arrival at Endeavour? Victoria had some pretty clear demarcation lines, most of them fatal to cross. Here we just seem to be flowing through a continuum of increasing downwardness.

Debating this is a waste of time, but if you want a crisp definition, 'there' means at the very clearly delineated edge of the ledge surrounding Cape York. One HiRISE pixel across!

There!

Phil

Not that it matters, really, but I'll consider us 'there' once Oppy passes the southern end of Cape York and is halfway across Botany Bay, that's always marked the finishing line for me. Others may consider Landfall, i.e rolling up onto Cape York to represent true arrival. It's just a personal view, I guess.

I wonder how long any IDD work might take? Could we have a tiny tiny delay in our journey due to something called radioactive decay.

That's what I was going to go with, Phil. Seems as good as any, and that strand line is a clear marked "finish" line right there on the surface. However, Oppy's trek has always been a series of "finish" lines, as soon as we get to one (edge of Endurance, edge of Victoria, edge of Endeavour), we/they spot another place we/they want to go to. So quite frankly, does it really matter?

Since Endeavour is mostly covered by sulfate sediments, perhaps "there" is when the first (basaltic?) material of the actual crater material is encountered, presumably on Cape York.

I remember reading about how long it takes the MB to do an integration these days; I know at landing it was 12 hours. So many half-lives have passed!

I've always considered arriving 'there' to have occurred once we have obtained a vantage point that shows most of the interior of Endeavor.
As with Victoria, it was when we arrived at a point on the crater lip where we could see not just our first glimpse of the dust-clogged drain at the bottom of the pool, but some of the foreground crater slope as well.. IMHO of course!

On a journey of this length, I think it's nice to have multiple arrival points.

--Greg

fredk, thanks for the response. I was wondering if what Stu refers to as "Tesh's Crater" in Post 351 of this thread appears right of center in Ant103's pic in Post 1099. That crater has captivated me since it first appeared on UMSF radar. It's a pretty serious divot on the rim of a gigantic crater, never seen anything like it.