Exploring Mt Sharp north of the dunes - Part 2: Beyond Big Sky, Site 50-51, sol 1148-1171, October 29, 2015-November 23, 2015 Options

[Phil Stooke]

Meanwhile, here's a look at some distant features. We have started the climb up the lower slopes of the mountain, and the view to the north and west is improving. In this image I have made a mosaic of several Mastcam frames from sol 1144, with some contrast enhancement and a 6x vertical stretch:



A, B and C identify three crater rims, and this image locates them:



Phil

[PaulH51]

Yes... I hope it will be fixed soon....

We got a whole bunch of Engineering images today Thanks to JPL for fixing the issue....
Too many errors likely caused by the heavy exposure variations, when I tried to stitch the end-of drive NavCam images together, probably better wait for Jan to perform his usual magic for those.

Meanwhile here is a lightly cropped preview of the erosion resistant 'East Glacier', images acquired on sol 1153. Assembled using MS ICE into this 11x2 R-MastCam mosaic. I waited a while for the remaining frames, but looks like we may have a slightly longer wait for those. I can imagine a few of the geologists on this forum would like to have seen some contact science there, but I guess they have to take the keys off the scientists every now and again, else we would still be in Yellowknife Bay

Full size only loaded to Imgur 11811 x 2183 pixels LINK

[PaulH51]

Mission Update from Ryan Anderson - Sol 1165: Uplink Problems LINK

Unfortunately, our plans for the weekend were thwarted by a problem with the Deep Space Network that prevented the plans from being sent to the rover. As someone on the team pointed out in response to the issue, this just goes to show how many steps in the process have to go just right for us to be able to operate a rover on Mars, and it’s pretty impressive that these sorts of issues are as rare as they are. Given its lack of instructions, Curiosity spent the weekend in “runout” mode. Runout mode mostly consists of environmental monitoring. Since the weekend plan was not uplinked, much of today’s plan contains repeats of what we tried to do over the weekend. In the sol 1166 plan, ChemCam has observations of the targets “Zaris” and “Swakop”, and Mastcam has a 5x4 mosaic of “Swakop” and its surroundings. Then we have a block of arm activities to allow MAHLI to take some images of the targets “Swartkloofberg” and “Swakop”. This will be followed by brushing the dust off of Swartkloofberg, taking some more MAHLI images, and then placing APXS on Swartkloofberg to analyze it overnight. Meanwhile, this week is the ChemCam team meeting here at USGS in Flagstaff! Since much of the team will be busy with the meeting, ChemCam activities this week will be kept to just two or three per day. The meeting also means that Ken, Lauren, and I will be extra busy this week so we won’t be blogging every day even though operations will be happening daily.

[jccwrt]

A couple postcard views now that we've got a big NavCam dump.


Curiosity - Sol 1160 by Justin Cowart, on Flickr


Curiosity - Sol 1162 by Justin Cowart, on Flickr

Kind of working my way backwards through the NavCam images. Sol 1158 looks like it will make a great postcard since it's got a spectacular view of Cut Bank Valley.

[PaulH51]

East Glacier: Sol 1153. 36 R-MastCam's stitched together with MS ICE.

Flickr Original Size 11975 x 4588 pixels LINK
Imgur Mirror: LINK

[jvandriel]

The Navcam L Panoramic view on Sol 1160.

Jan van Driel

[jccwrt]

Curiosity took a 360 degree MastCam panorama on Sol 1154. I've stitched it together and done a little bit of warping to flatten the horizon out a bit. The mosaic just missed getting the top of Mt. Sharp, so I added three frames from the Sol 1144 MastCam mosaic to make sure the entire massif was in the panorama. The sky was pretty mangled from the compression artifacts, so I just removed it entirely and made a new one working off the original data.



The full size version can be found here. (Warning: it's 69mb!)

[atomoid]

beautiful 360. thanks for that. here is a quick long-baseline anaglyph with nice stereo separation but bad lighting of the Mt Sharp spillway area between sol1151/sol1155

[Phil Stooke]

Here is Jan's panorama from sol 1160 in circular form. A nice view of the outcrop.

Phil

[PaulH51]

Midnight Planets is reporting : Curiosity moved approximately 34.1 meters (112 feet) south-south-west during Sol 1167 (November 18, 2015) Drive duration was ~55 minutes.
quickly assembled 'look ahead' mosaic using a selection of the available L-NavCams, assembled in MS ICE/
Clicking the image preview should open the file loaded on Imgur (Flickr was down)

[Gerald]

The REMS page has yet to update (after their usual weekend break), I will check later to see if the raw data trend continues, or if it returns back to the seasonal norms.

REMS mean pressure looks reasonable again with 897 Pa.

[jvandriel]

The Navcam L panorama on Sol 1162.

Jan van Driel

[PaulH51]

REMS mean pressure looks reasonable again with 897 Pa.

Thanks Gerald, you beat me to it
Meanwhile, staying on the topic of REMS, the UV detector was imaged on 1166 and we see an hefty increase in dust levels compared with the last image. Here is a montage showing the steady increase over 10 measurements.

Flickr Original Size 8320 x 2829 pixels LINK
Imgur mirror LINK

[Phil Stooke]

Jan's 1162 panorama in circular format.

Phil

[Herobrine]

NAVCAM travel animation for Sol 1160 is 47 frames.
Here's a small preview of the left NAVCAM's view.

And here is the full-size stereo pair animation for Parallel and Cross-Eye viewing. File sizes are 7 MiB each.

NAVCAM travel animation for Sol 1162 is 51 frames.
Here's a small preview of the left NAVCAM's view.

And here is the full-size stereo pair animation for Parallel and Cross-Eye viewing. File sizes are 8 MiB each.