After Victoria..., .. what next? Options

[Stu]

I know we've had rather light-hearted discussions about this before, with most people agreeing that Oppy is likely to end her days inside or on the edge of Victoria Crater, simply because there's nothing else to investigate within reach, but has Steve S got it in his mind that Oppy will head off somewhere else after Victoria? This report could be read in a way that suggests that...

[Stu]

As much as I love the romance of that idea, it does look a ridiculously far way away to me ustrax... with many months potential dust dune traps and (relatively) featureless terrain to slog through and over before our brave gal finally reached the edge of a crater so big and so wide that surely all we'd see of it from the rim would be teeny mountains stretching across the distant horizon...

I think that when Oppy comes back out of VC she'll be kept busy exploring other features around the rim... Soup Dragon calls, as does Sofi crater, as do a dozen other farside features... there'd be a good chance of Oppy catching changes in the structure of the dunes on the floor with prolonged observation... it would be worth monitoring the outcrops for signs of landslides... so many more reasons for staying, I think, than for striking out for new targets when what is almost certainly the most fantastic scientific site the MER team could have hoped to reach is available.

But hey, who knows what lies out there in the deep desert?