The West Valley Route Options

[Tesheiner]

Here're the latest navcam pictures taken during sol 1850: http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/navcam/2009-03-18/

Spirit is no longer stuck, but I think the attempt to go on top of HP via the NE path is finished and we are going to the West Valley. A pancam mosaic of the western route is planned for tosol.

[Ipparchus]

Does anyone of you have any altitude and hazard maps of the Goddard-Von Braun area (red for dangerous areas etc)? The maps of this area make me feel quite pessimistic about the ability of Spirit to reach and study these targets. Von Braun has a high tilt (it seems to be difficult to climb it) and Goddard is a crater-shaped target and its tilt and soil slipperiness may make it a difficult to reach target and maybe a sand trap when Spirit tries to get out of it. If she fails to reach and study these targets what other options does she have (what other interesting targets are in this area)?

[Geert]

Does anyone of you have any altitude and hazard maps of the Goddard-Von Braun area (red for dangerous areas etc)?

Problem with all these maps is that you have to work on a very small area and way below the resolution of most instruments (except HiRISE), which simply means that there is not so much data to crunch on and that greatly effects the accuracy of any predictions.

Variance map I posted earlier already, only increased it a bit to show von Braun / Goddard. Red shows area's with large variance in HiRISE brightness which might indicate a rough surface and thus dangerous driving. Blue is slightly better but still dangerous and lightgreen is the least bad.



Below map is maybe interesting, this shows terrain type if I also take into account relative brightness in HiRISE (I would prefer to use CRISM for this, but it won't work on such a small scale). In this case colors do NOT have a specific meaning but they are only used to mark terrain with the same characteristics (brightness and variance). This means that there is a chance that all terrain with the same color, will show approximately the same driving characteristics.



Once again, don't assign any specific meaning to the colors themselves in above image, colors only note area's with the same characteristics, so if Spirit has been driving on terrain with a certain color, and futher on there is terrain with the same color, you might get the same driving experience there. Wish there was more available data (especially on hights/slopes/composition/etc) but apart from HiRISE almost all instruments have not enough resolution to produce trustworthy results in such a small area.

In the end it will be the eyes of Spirit itself with give the most information, together offcourse with the experience of the drivers.