Endeavour Drive - Drivability analysis Options

[djellison]

http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200809191

You can listen via NPR, or via one of the web feeds that are listed on the site, but make sure you do listen if you can.

[Tesheiner]

Yeah, it's time for back-seat driving and here's yet another potential route.
It's not covering the whole way to Endeavour but only to a small Endurance-like crater mid-way between VC and Endeavour, named here "Mini-Endurance" by SFJCody. Instead of searching for a path from VC to ME I did the opposite; from Mini-Endurance to Victoria. The terrain around Mini-Endurance looks pretty easy and becomes more wavy closer to VC. I won't be afraid because, except for the part closer to VC after the annulus, the terrain is similar or smother than the one nearby Vicking and Voyager craters.


Here're some snapshots (HiRISE) of the waypoints and of Vicking/Voyager for comparision.
Mini-Endurance:
M -1: , M -2:
M -3: , M -4:

M -5: , M -6:

Vicking & Voyager:

Open this page and scroll down to the Vicking panorama to have a look to the kind of terrain we are talking about.

[RoverDriver]

Yeah, it's time for back-seat driving and here's yet another potential route.
It's not covering the whole way to Endeavour but only to a small Endurance-like crater mid-way between VC and Endeavour, named here "Mini-Endurance" by SFJCody. Instead of searching for a path from VC to ME I did the opposite; from Mini-Endurance to Victoria. The terrain around Mini-Endurance looks pretty easy and becomes more wavy closer to VC. I won't be afraid because, except for the part closer to VC after the annulus, the terrain is similar or smother than the one nearby Vicking and Voyager craters.

Good thinking. At this time it might be best if we concentrate on the area visible in this HiRISE image and then we will go from there. Correlating the new terrain with terrain we have driven on is exactly right. We (well, *I* do, unfortunately this is one of the the details I cannot talk about) have engineering telemetry and can determine how fast (meters per sol) we can drive. I was wondering if there was a way to automate terrain evaluation, I'm mostly worried about ripples. Maybe applying the FFT to patches of the greyscale image can tell us where the scary ripples are. Maybe some other texture filters?

I think that spending some time getting our tools ready to evaluate the new HiRISE images might be the best thing to do. It will help in the near term and it will make our life easier in the long run.

Paolo