The western route, 5th leg after stop at Absecon / Reeds Bay Options

[Phil Stooke]

The crater namers forgot that they had already used the name Alvin. Check out the very first post in the Opportunity Route Map thread many years ago... So they had to re-name the crater.

Phil

[Tesheiner]

Thanks for the info, Phil.

Time for another map update...

[Tesheiner]

Here's our target "Block Island" in sight some 20m to the south.
We might get there in one driving sol and in position for IDD work in two more.

[SFJCody]

Two foreign forms on a sand ribbed plain

One low entropy
The other high

One moves
The other still

One itinerant
The other resident

One seeks
The other found

The seeker approaches

[Stu]

Land - well, something interesting - ho..!

[BrianL]

At this distance and angle, my mind is turning that object into a tiny boat being tossed about in the waves.

[Guest_Bobby_*]

What are those Crab Fishermen from The Deadliest Catch doing here on Mars?

Are they trying to catch cobbles of crabs here?

[glennwsmith]

SFJCody, your poem is clever and elegant. It calls to mind this one:


Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".


Hope I am not duplicating the work of someone else who has been inspired by the Meridiani landscape to post this poem . . . (and Stu -- haven't digested your longer poem yet -- but to whom does "The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed" refer to, ie, can you diagram that sentence?)

And a related analog is, of course, the Rosetta Stone -- which is black -- and Block Island may prove to be a geological Rosetta Stone.

[Guest_Enceladus75_*]

The latest traverse map looks puzzling. Does this mean the Oppy team have now abandoned going West and will resume a route to the South?

Or is there some other reason for the U turn?

[centsworth_II]

...Or is there some other reason for the U turn?

Go back to post 43 of this thread and read on from there.

Yes, the reason is to go back for a look at the rock, Block Island.

[Astrophil]

Excuse the jumping in here, but... Shelley, I'd say, is using "survive" in the sense of "outlive". So, the frown shows that the sculptor did a good job of reading the passions of Ozymandias. Thanks to the dead stones they're carved on, these passions outlive both the hand that 'mocked' (imitated) them (ie the sculptor) and the heart that fed them (ie Ozymandias himself).

As glennwsmith says, it's a good poem for Mars.

[Stu]

Getting closer...

[Stu]

Wider angle view...

[CryptoEngineer]

This is probably a stupid question, but.....

Are meteorites on Mars actually interesting? I'm fully aware that BI may be a piece of deep ejecta, and appreciate why that would make it worth investigating, but the rovers have seen a couple well identified meteorites, and spent some considerable time going over them.

What can we learn from them that is different than what we would learn from meteorites on Earth?

CE

[Phil Stooke]

What's especially interesting is how many there seem to be. If this is typical, it suggests a rich area of future sampling opportunities during human Mars exploration missions, especially looking for very rare types. Comparing the range of types found on Mars with those found on Earth may be interesting too.

Phil