To commemorate the long-anticipated ...

[wait for it]

... completion of 4 Martian years of optical depth monitoring, and the commencement of the fifth with tosol's downlink (oh, wait, is there something else going on?), I've put a new tool up. Actually, it is for some pretty utilitarian reasons, but the recent questions about tau numbers prompted me to share, now that I think I have it working.

So if you don't care what tau is--other than to wish it would go down--ignore this, but otherwise you'll find updates and some summary info at http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~lemmon/mars-tau-b.html. Parts of it may not work on all browsers. Since it really is just a tool to help me keep an eye on things when I am away from ops, I'm only concerned that it works on mine (recent firefox; the clock probably works with others, the plot may not like IE but seems OK with safari).

Thanks for making that public, Mark! That makes it clear that we've had a pretty good summer, tau-wise, compared with previous years. And that probably helped with the amazing progress we've made getting to Endeavour. Can't wait for the dust to settle...

I'd bet it was named in honour of the Apollo 13 Command Module...

Or the long-serving orbiter that has been Oppy's main data relay.

Or maybe it was named after the restaurant in Mission Hills, California, 25 miles from JPL, with the breathtaking view of the San Fernando Valley.

God, this is fun to watch.

-m

Looks like the backlog of images from the past week is starting to come down.

Sol 2674 (three days ago)....nice view.

Thanks Mark, I didn't realise we're starting MY5 (not to be mistaken with MI-5 )
And you're right, no curve shows on IE but's ok on safari.
We're looking at the green curve I believe (for some reason MY30 shows before MY29). Neither I realized what Fred comments about Tau's help on Oppy roving performences.

I love this picture : http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...YMP1797R0M1.JPG
It illustrates the long long way travelled by Oppy and its endeavour to reach the crater.

This confused me for a bit - I was getting unsorted MY labels but for me MY 30 was the red plot. Anyway I think Mark's been busy - it's now correctly sorting and it wasn't about 20 minutes ago. Mark - for what it's worth I've got no issues seeing the plot using Chrome on Windows, the Android phone browser or Safari on IOS4. IE9 just displays the text.

The current Martian Year Tau plot (which is purple for me now) runs up to around LS 340 as it should. The plot line for MY 28 is now red and it's more obvious that it disappears up into the stratosphere around the LS 370-320 region which corresponds to the massive storm during July\August 2007 (Sols 1220 - 1270 or thereabouts) when we briefly saw Tau numbers as high as 4.7 as I recall.

Fantastic app Mark by the way - I love to see data presented in a meaningful way like this. This makes the seasonal patterns of the atmospheric conditions very clear, and shows just how variable they can be too.

Having the Tau automatically published in this way is a real treat - it really is a live weather report from another planet.

I kinda hit the time I had allocated for making the tau page well-behaved, as opposed to just functional, with a few open issues. One is the IE thing. The other is that the data loads asynchronously, but is kicked off in the proper order. So it tries to load in the right order, but the file sizes differ. So, you get random ordering to the Mars years, and random colors. When it bugs me enough, I think I know how to implement the fix.

Here's the 360x90 Navcam panorama from Sol 2674 (August 2). The apparent dip of the land should be taken with a grain of salt; I tried to correct the rover orientation data, but probably did not get it exactly right.

Interestingly, there's a component to the apparent tilt of the image at certain rover azimuths because of clock drift.

-m

That's interesting. There was some mention recently of attempting to warm the rover's electronics to try to mitigate clock drift. Is it possible to just reset the clock to correct for the drift?

After they named some new points at the crater rim, I updated my Google Earth / Mars placemark file.

I added explanations of every point around Endeavour crater and Cape York, so we can see, what's the origin of the name is. Please correct me, if I took the wrong places. (Is Antares crated really named after a Apollo lunar module (it's just my assumption)).

I took the explanations from Wikipedia, and added also links to it. So everyone can find out, whats is behind this name. Most names are connected to Lt. James Cooks journeys. Who did believe this?

Here is a screenshot.

I also updated the list of meteorites placemark file with also adding excerpts from the Wikipedia.

[EDIT: Little typo in crater name]