The western route, 5th leg after stop at Absecon / Reeds Bay Options

[Tesheiner]

Time for a new thread.
After moving southwards for ages, the "detour" by the western path has started with a 60+ meters drive on sol 1942.


There are no images yet --they should be available on the next update-- so this image was calculated solely based on the rover's mobility info. I'll update the route map later.

[fredk]

Thanks for the maps, guys. I now measure the distance to BI to be 66 metres from the sol 1942 location. That gives a size for the rock of about 67 cm wide by 30 cm high.

The approximate size of BI would've been known before they moved away from the 1942 location - the navcams were down and the pancams were targeted. So I'm guessing that the spectral info from the BI pancam sequence was important in the decision to go back.

Do the oldtimers here remember another time that they turned back to study a target? There's been backtracking due to mobility problems, but I don't recall anything like this.

[alan]

Do the oldtimers here remember another time that they turned back to study a target? There's been backtracking due to mobility problems, but I don't recall anything like this.

They turned Spirit back on sol 454 when the layering at Methuselah was spotted while Spirit was attempting to drive up Husband Hill. Spirit then spent an additional two month's there.

For several months, Spirit climbed a flank of Husband Hill, the tallest in the range. The slope closely matched the angle of underlying rock layers, which made the layering difficult to detect. Spirit reached an intermediate destination, dubbed "Larry's Lookout," then continued uphill and looked back. "That was the critical moment, when it all began falling into place," Squyres said. "Looking back downhill, you can see the layering, and it suddenly starts to makes sense."

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/newsroom/pr.../20050524a.html


Methuselah:
http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_...selah_new2.html