Post Conjunction: Santa Maria to Cape York, The Journey to 'Spirit Point' |
Post Conjunction: Santa Maria to Cape York, The Journey to 'Spirit Point' |
Feb 8 2011, 03:35 PM
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Senior Member Group: Admin Posts: 4763 Joined: 15-March 05 From: Glendale, AZ Member No.: 197 |
Starting a new topic to include Eduardo's Google overlay for the rest of the journey to Cape York:
http://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/gmars_ma...41_1775_RED.kml Follow the link above and it should load right in to your Google Mars features. I took a low crow's flight along the final 6km this morning. Below in green is what I think the final route will look like. Also an interesting feature along the way that appears to be a cluster of rocks, possibly Santa Maria ejecta, or large meteorite fragments. Note how the dune has evolved around the three (or more) objects. Object is at -2.199395°, -5.396676° -- roughly 3km down range from Santa Maria. EDIT: bad link replaced, wider context image added for three rocks. -------------------- If Occam had heard my theory, things would be very different now.
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Apr 9 2011, 12:15 AM
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Senior Member Group: Admin Posts: 4763 Joined: 15-March 05 From: Glendale, AZ Member No.: 197 |
With sol 2560's drive, that's almost exactly a full kilometer of driving in the two weeks since she left Santa Maria -- to put that in perspective, there are roughly only 5km left to the base of Cape York (as the crow flies). So as long as our rover driver friends can keep up this pace and steer those wheels straight with no stops for sightseeing, we're going to be there sooner than any of us might have imagined.
-------------------- If Occam had heard my theory, things would be very different now.
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Apr 9 2011, 03:41 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 206 Joined: 15-August 07 From: Shrewsbury, Shropshire Member No.: 3233 |
...a full kilometer of driving in the two weeks ... 5km left to the base of Cape York The most over the top estimate of how far Oppy could drive in how long was tweeted by Scott Maxwell. He was trying to calculate how long it would take Oppy to drive to Spirit's current location to clean Spirit's solar panels: Mars radius = 3400km, circumference = 21k km. To go ~half that (~10k km) @ 1km/8 days = 80k days = 219 yrs! |
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