A small update - we moved up to the rock ledge. No names yet in this area.

Phil

The SPICE data files give the elevation of the rover as well. I was thinking about some kind of odometry page--here's a start:

Curiosity drive distance vs. elevation

So while the ultimate goal is southwest and up, Curiosity has been steadily heading east and down, now about 18 meters lower than the landing site. But given that Hottah was determined to be an ancient riverbed, and that guano flows downhill, maybe Yellowknife Bay isn't a bad place to be.

Thanks for that chart jmknapp! I've been curious to see a similar chart for Opportunity. Emily did a great elevation overlay for the Google Mars map, but at the time they only had a few passes on the western edge of Endeavour crater. I gotta check that out!

Coming up with drive stats, like the number of drives, for how much distance, what speed, etc. turns out to be tricky! Seems that the rover goes in short bursts, at least according to the SPICE data. Here's a speed vs. time plot of the last drive of about 21 meters on sol 133:



So it took about an hour, with a number of bursts of speed of about 3 cm/sec. Whew! Each sprint is about 1 meter.

Hold on to your hat! I really like what you're doing with all this data. Maybe there's a hazard check after each short move?

Phil

Maybe its nickname could be Chitty Chitty Bang Bang--it just hasn't deployed the wings and propeller yet.

Seems the same as with the MERs when driving with "visodom".

This drive, as most of the recent drives were done with VisOdom. The 133 drive also had a NavMap checkout during teh first two 1m steps.

Paolo

Here's a page with a log of all the drives to date, based on SPICE files:

Curiosity drive log

For each drive there are links for a map and a speed/elevation vs. time plot.

Since the rover does a lot of starting and stopping in the midst of drives it's a little arbitrary to define drive boundaries. My code allows stopping intervals of up to 5000 seconds during a drive before it marks it complete. That seems to give a consistent number of drives and confines each one to one sol. That comes out to 34 drives to date--don't know how they officially number the drives, if they do.

Can't get the links working.
E.g. "Drive 34 map" shows some data like distance and duration but no map. I'm using IE7 / WinXP on this computer.


They seem to be using a similar approach as with Spirit / Opportunity, keeping two counters named "site" and "drive". On MER they can be seen on each image filename but on MSL is a bit more complicated. At least we can find them on the navcams e.g. on this one (NLA_409829640EDR_M0051858NCAM00505M_) taken on sol 139, site/drive is 005/1858.

Try setting "compatibility" mode in IE--I think I can do that in the markup but am away from my computer at the moment (sent from my mobile).

I wonder what the drive counter signifies--doesn't appear to be meters.

EDIT: made a change that appears to have fixed the IE problem.

No it's not related to distance but to the number of drive commands within a driving sequence. At least on MER.

Just a quick reminder - I'm travelling and will update my map early January when back in my office. The things jmknapp is doing for us are amazing and very welcome.

Phil

It is the same on MSL as well. It is used to identify a specific location within a drive, and by extension, within a site.

Paolo

Here's a way to get notified by twitter when Curiosity logs a drive:

https://twitter.com/CuriosityLog

Follow that to get a tweet when the NAIF position data is updated. The stream currently has the 34 drives to date added in one shot (the most recent drive was on Dec. 20), but future drives should have a more contemporaneous twitter time stamp. My code checks the NAIF files every hour, so there should be no more than a hour between the update and the tweet. Be among the first to know!