Then you'll know and understand perfectly that the scientists would love to make progress, but it makes no engineering sense to do things like get more stuck in a sand dune, or irreperably damage the IDD.

You want them to rush the procedure out of Purgatory and get stuck even more?

You want them to drive in a way that risks damaging the IDD beyond use or crank the current at that shoulder joint till it burns out?

YES - we all want to make good progress, but there are times when one simply can not do so.

Another 100 engineers on the case, and perhaps the purgatory and IDD situations could have been worked faster, but they're not around to do that, the money isnt there. Say "we'll need X engineers to keep running" - then the financial 'ask' for further extensions is too big and it's not going to happen.

Lest we forget, it's only by hanging around at Erebus that we discovered the potential festooning. Another part of the jigsaw. We'd never had a panorama taken in all filters, we do now. These are not 'lost sols' - they're simply sols not doing what you want them to be doing. That's not lost, it's just different.

I still maintain you dramatically underestimate what has been discovered at Erebus, and given the time it takes, there will be many a scientific paper which makes reference to the work here.

Again - yes - driving is great and we'd all love to see much much more of it, but it's a case of what is possible with the resources ( on both planets ) available, not what we 'want'.

Doug

Very good points Doug !

also thanks for pointing out the case for Spirits long distance driving which demonstrates that
they have indeed prioritized driving over "studying" with much of Spirit's recently ...

I too believe that every single day spent at Purgatory was a clever and valuable investment because
it lead to the development of a safe inter-dune driving technique that would have allowed us to safely cover 20 to 40 meters per sol in the middle of the dunes without the risk of being stuck again ...
so any rushing or premature driving in this stage would have been suicide ...
The criticsism, if at all, is not against the disaster management, which has been outstanding
(great kudos to the JPL team for getting us out of purgatory, can't be said often enough
However, what I don't understand is that they did not make use of this great new driving strategy
WHEN IT WAS STILL POSSIBLE to cover more terrain in the mean time (since purgatory, at 30 meter per day in 90 days we could have been already visiting places 3 kilometers apart (including Victoria) !
... and still would have had the time for occasional stops, just with more selective and parsimonious
use of the IDD...
After all we knew that the time was limited ... now, of course, it is too late to "rush" ... the critical
situations have to be fixed first with absolute priority (as Steve S. use to say: first rule: don't make things worse)
I really hope if we do re-gain nornal driving operations, that we use the "healthy periods" for as much driving as possible

two posts deleted, one that was a personal attack and contributed nothing but flame to the thread, and one that replied to it.

Healthy debate is welcome here. Unsubstantiated ranting and attacts at members have not, nor ever will be.

Doug

I don't think that's the case. Remember the stuck joint heater cannot be isolated independently, the only way to turn it off is to effectively turn the whole rover off! (deep sleep)

I suspect that if the arm did snap off or start dragging along the ground (heaven forbid!) there would be a serious risk of shorting the battery out, which would kill Oppy pretty much instantly I would imagine.

I agree, and I don’t think BillyMERs rather cringe-inducing post added anything to the discussion.

Looking at the orbital photos of the area around Victoria, there may be some non-engineering reasons for the slow pace. Maybe the thinking is that, since there are few reachable science targets after Victoria, areas of interest en route to it should be studied as much as possible. Although there appears to be a ramp into the crater there is no guarantee that the rover can use it to get in. If they couldn’t enter Victoria once they got there, they would be in very bland terrain -from orbit it resembles the “parking lot” between Eagle and Endurance. There would be few attractive targets within reasonable driving distance once they documented the rim, did remote sensing and so on, so from that point of view it may make sense to take their time..

Ben, those circular fractures or plates have been driving us nuts for months. Theywere first noticed on the Erebus north rim and the speculation was that they might be related to eroded small impact features; I don't know what current thought is.

Hopefully they will get the IDD problem resolved and get on the way to the next area. I'm still curious about the dark basal unit in the Mogollon area.

--Bill

Darn! I hate it when I miss those.

Thanks for the response; Something like those circular cracks we created in plate glass windows with errant pellets from our air rifles. I agree about that basal unit also and wonder if the pile of dark rocks which we may never see could be related. maybe the crater penetrated into basalt??

I misleadingly call the dark unit "basal" when it clearly isn't. Erebus was not deep enough to punch though the entire Burns Formation and we are approaching the topographic highpoint of this area. The dark cobbles we've been seeing have been described as basaltic so there is the possibility that this dark unit is also. We honestly won't know what it is until Oppy places her boots upon it.

--Bill

Or they could go balls to the wall south after Victoria. There's a massive crater about 10 km to the south east of Victoria:



Hey one can dream :-)

Did somebody realized that today is SOL 1500 if you add both rovers ? That give us 8.73 meter per sol as a mean. Not bad, eh ?

Another 9 hours away till the sols add up - but yup, I was thinking about that a few days ago, and Steve's comments last year about reaching 1000 sols.

Also -we're coming up to 150,000 images - 67,237 + 78,008 = 145,000. About an average of 96 images per sol.

Doug

May I suggest direct links to BIG images should be avoided?

Links to them - not a problem. Having them inline of the thread, not so great for those without BBand

Doug

Yeah that's the one I mentioned when Oppy was putting together these record drives. Right now with the way things are going, they will consider themselves lucky just to get to Victoria.