There are beautifull Japanese rock gardens inbetween the sand waves. And Erebus on the top left starts to show himself better.

original PanCam image

Added some sunlight/contrast/sharpen : (191 kB)

Yeah, it looks like the soil is getting different - all disturbed crests of dunes are kinda brighter. IMHO the etched terrain won't be much different than the plains behind Oppy - just the soil will be much brighter.

PS. I'm working on simple image name decoder, probably will finish it in couple of hours.

Erm, has to be some strange logic to end up with that solution.

Since you are starting up a dos window anyway, why not type in the command directly there? You can just do
C:\rawid.exe 1R166636041EFF5400P1315R0M1.JPG
and it'll give you the output, assuming rawid.exe is in your PATH. The simplest way of ensuring that is just copy the file rawid.exe into C:\Windows or C:\Windows\system.

I wish people would still learn command line interfaces. They are hugely powerful for simple tasks like this. I would never want to run something like this in a GUI.

I haven't tried Midnight Mars Browser, but I am surprised that decoding of the file names isn't included there.

Yes - but you cant copy and paste into a dos box - you have to type the filename (and 99% of the time get it a bit wrong

doug

Yes you can. There is a menu behind the little C:\ prompt icon in the upper left corner of the dosbox window and you can do Edit->Paste there.

I believe you can Doug, i just tried (Win2k) : by right clicking in the dos box, it pasted the text i copied before.

edit : i just saw akuo answer, we posted at the same time, both answers are valid though

My GOD do you have any idea how long I've been trying to do that for

Thanks chaps

Doug

Antlion pit! )

What the heck, that thing is quite odd looking - and there's a smaller one to the left of it, slightly farther away. I'd imagine something like that to be fairly fresh too.

How long ago was this picture taken? Did Opportunity already move away from it?

Must have been taken last week. I felt silent after seeing this. If it's a meteorite crater, it certainly must be fresh. If it is not...then what is it ?

According to rawid.exe :
Acquisition time (Mars): Sol 433 15:01:56
Current local time (Mars): Sol 434 02:52:23
Elapsed time since acquisition: 0 days, 11:39:09

As I noted within the last week, here, it looks from the orbital images like there are two different types of terrain between here an Victoria -- the true etched terrain (which features outcrops of evaporite) and a stretch of duned ground that appears to incorporate both dark and light sand/dust in the regolith and duning, but no evaporite outcrops. It's that second type of terrain, which only includes lighter sand in the regolith, that we're crossing now -- in fact, we don't really get to any of the "true" etched terrain until after we pass Erebus (unless we want to make a detour to the west of Erebus, which doesn't appear likely).

I think we're seeing the first examples of eroded evaporite dust mixed in with the broken-up concretion materials that make up the dark regolith out on the dark plains. And if that's the case, since the evaporites are primarily salt-cake rock, it would make sense for the lighter sand to compress into a shinier surface under the wheels -- just like salt-rich soil has been doing at Gusev.

So far, my theory looks pretty good... *grin*...

-the other Doug

Well, it's either a small meteor crater (not unlikely, considering the thin Martian atmosphere, that an impactor the size of a grain of sand would hit and make a tiny crater) or it's a small sinkhole.

It's not at all difficult to imagine voids and gaps in the evaporite layer -- after all, subsidence around organized voids probably formed Anatolia and the other cracks we see out in the plains. But this crater, situated halfway up the crest of a dune, looks a lot more like a tiny impact crater.

As such, it would only display the constituents of the sand in the dune... and therefore wouldn't be all that interesting to Oppy's remote sensors. Right?

-the other Doug

Consider also a martian Myrmeleon Formicarius pitfall ......

.. should be ant-lion in english.

As far as what sol an image was taken on, that info is shown in the title bar. I will try to include a Image Info window with information comparable to rawid.exe in the next version.