Cape York - Northern Havens, Sol 2780 - 2947 Options

[Stu]

Oppy seems to have stopped to catch her breath at Turkey Haven, and the latest Hazcams show she is preparing to spend some time studying the rocks there, so this seems like a good time to start a new topic.

If you have any images/observations to share relating to Oppy's approach to Turkey Haven, please post them in the previous thread.

To start us going, here's my take on Oppy's view of Turkey Haven - not suggesting the colours are particularly realistic, but they do show, I think, the great variety of tones and hues visible on the rocks at this intriguing place...

[fredk]

There are lots of juicy tidbits in the latest Planetary update. Here are the highlights:

"The other cool thing we did... was what I call a triple crunch over Homestake," said Arvidson. "...We crunched it, removed the dust cover to the extent it existed, and exposed some bright sparkly bits."

OOhhh, sparkly bits. I wonder if that's a clue. Either way, the sparkles don't seem to have survived the jpegging/stretching of the released images.

When the data... on Transvaal arrived on Earth, the scientists basically shrugged. "It looks like Chester Lake, nothing special," as Arvidson summed it up.

Planning for winter:

"There's a southern candidate for a winter haven and a northern candidate... within about 20 meters of one another, and they both have slopes of 10 to 20 degrees north," said Arvidson... "...we will have to assess the science at both [sites] before deciding where the vehicle will spend the winter," added Squyres.

Callas: "...we need to be above a 5-degree slope by January. That means we don't have to hunker down now, and that we could spend December doing science, just as long as we're always never more than a short step away from getting into that winter haven."

Arvidson: "Then, sometime in January, we'll put the vehicle in either the northern site or the southern site and begin the winter science campaign there"

And some very interesting discussion about the possibility of cleaning events:

"It turns out in all the wind modeling and the observations that people see of streaks, if the vehicle is exposed to winds coming from the southeast, [from which] the winds blow during the Martian winters, there's a possibility for a dust clearing," said Arvidson.

At the place currently known as Turkey Haven, "we can actually see to the southeast into the crater Endeavour, so that would be a good place in terms of maximizing the chance that we'll get some dust removal," Arvidson pointed out. "We need to evaluate possible locations like that at the northern site."

"If we got 10-degree slope, we would have power levels comparable to the last Martian winter for Opportunity," Callas informed. "It would really be desirous to have as much tilt as possible this winter, but also as much mobility as possible. In all previous Martian years, we've always had a cleaning event sometime before the winter solstice and we haven't had one yet, and we can't plan on it. This could be the year we don't get a cleaning event, in which case we'd want to get as much tilt as possible," he rationalized.