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.

[Phil Stooke]

Here's a comparison of textures, all at 100% from the IAS viewer provided on the HiRISE site. It's not at all useful to view the images at lower resolution.



The top three show places we know. At Vostok it was still possible to drive diagonally across the drifts. At Purgatory the only possible route was parallel to the crests, or zig-zagging around individual drifts, quite slowly.

Below that are various areas at the same scale as the first row. East of Victoria is a huge band of big drifts. It's not practical to try to drive eastwards through them. At low resolution it looks like the crests are E-W, but they aren't - those are a different scale of massive mounds superimposed on the drifts, like Purgatory itself.

The E-W band of outcrop shown on the low-res map linked to above is actually very bad - huge drifts cover much of it. It is not a highway leading east.

The best plan is to run south through the smaller drifts. HiRISE lets one map them out very easily, and clumps of bigger drifts can be avoided very easily. By the time we get to that mini-Endurance crater the surface is much smoother and from then on it looks easy (within the existing HiRISE coverage).

Phil

[RoverDriver]

Here's a comparison of textures, all at 100% from the IAS viewer provided on the HiRISE site. It's not at all useful to view the images at lower resolution.
...

This is excellent. Thanks to you all who contributed so far. It will take me a few days to digest all this. I will keep you posted.

Paolo