Egressing The Dune, ... soon Options

[akuo]

I decided to add a new topic since we are all following it closely and something is bound to happen soon. Jim Erickson said that earliest Oppy would be making her move would be on Friday, but Steve's update might be read that it isn't happening so soon. I doubt they will be doing anything during the weekend, so Monday maybe?

Anyway the Planetary Photojournal (http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/snt) has some images from sandbox testing at JPL.

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

But this sounds a little more encouraging:

Dr. Robert Sullivan of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., a rover science team member, worked with engineers in the JPL testbed to match the properties of the test sand as closely as possible with those of the sand beneath Opportunity, based on images of wheels and wheel tracks on Mars. "We found that when the wheels dig in, the material we're using does stick to the wheels and fills the gaps between the cleats, but it doesn't stick when you're just driving over it. That's good because it's the same as what we see in the images from Opportunity," Sullivan said.

Experiments indicate that in this more powdery material, the test rover positioned comparably to Opportunity can drive out after some initial wheel-spinning. More testing, analysis, planning and review will precede any actual commands for Opportunity to begin driving away from the dune.