Extricating Spirit, Digging out from Troy Options

[briv1016]

5 downsampled navcam frames from sol 2078 are down. Someone might want to make an animation.

[centsworth_II]

Good briefing, lots of new details.

I liked the description of Spirit sitting right on a boundary between the highest sulfate level material found by either rover under the left wheel and basaltic material under the right wheel. The sulfur material being the soft, light material on the crater (down slope) side of the rover. Also the vertical changes from the surface of the duricrust to lower in the crust to beneath the crust showing water processes that occurred since volcanic activity in the area ceased.

I don't remember the danger of the belly rock being caught in a engineering depression in the underbelly being brought up before. One reason for driving forward rather than backward. I think that depression is visible in the underbelly images to the left of the belly rock's tip.

The detailed description of what occurred in the last days before halting driving operations was interesting. I found it encouraging that the (middle?) wheel stall seems to have not reoccurred when that wheel was tested. Also, the extraction maneuver, straight forward, is a maneuver that was not previously tried when the rover first became mired. A fresh maneuver leaves room for fresh hope... for me. Also good is the rover was still making progress when the driving was halted and was not just spinning its wheels. The progress was, however, in the down slope direction which is no longer considered a good idea, which is why the wheels were straightened for a straight forward drive.
edit: To clarify, the rover was going backwards toward Von Brun when it stopped. So a forward drive will be heading back in the direction it came from.

My fantasy: The wheels catch traction on some buried rocks and Tuesday morning images show the rover popped out and looking back at Belly Rock.