Perseverance Route Map Options

[Phil Stooke]

Now we are down safely I am starting a map thread. Everything that happens during 2021 will be covered in my still-in-progress atlas, so I have to make the maps for that and everyone can follow as they evolve.

Let me know if any feature names start to show up.

Preliminary map even though not much has happened yet. But if you look closely you will see something, even now.

Phil

[tau]

. . . I am also looking for the list of Sols for each kilometers covered. (1 km = Sol 130 (02-07-2021), 2 km = Sol 177 (19-08-2021), 3 km = ?, etc...) . . .

Here is my attempt to create a map of kilometer marks and the sols when the rover reached them.
For calculation I used the json file under "Rover Drive Path" in the Perseverance's location map.
The first complication I encountered was that the individual drives are not in chronological order. The rover seemed to be jumping around.
After re-arranging them in chronolocical order, a continuous polyline was created for calculation of the kilometer marks.
As cartographical projection (which has influence on the calculated lengths) I applied an equidistant cylindrical projection
with standard parallel at 18.4663°N (the center of the planned landing ellipse) on a spherical Mars with a radius of 3396190 m,
which is most likely the projection used in the json files and JPL's location map.
Then I tried to find out the UTC date and time on Earth when the kilometer marks were reached by the rover.
There are two entries in the json drive path file for every drive: SCLK_START and SCLK_END (SCLK= spacecraft clock).
They are counted in seconds which can be correlated to UTC. But the time between start and end of an individual drive is in some
cases more than one Earth day, on sol 340 even more than five days which obviously is not real. Maybe, it is possible to narrow down
the time interval of the drive with the help of the raw images, where the large number following the sol number in the file name is
the SCLK time when the image was taken. If I'm not wrong, the clock seems to be a little bit slow, about 0.7 seconds behind per day.