Opportunity Route Map Options

[Tesheiner]

Route map, updated to sol 762.

(332k)

BTW, the rover is leaving the landing ellipse.

[Bob Shaw]

BTW, the rover is leaving the landing ellipse.

'Elvis has *left* the buildinggggg!'

Bob Shaw

[dilo]

I think is time to resume vertical-projection maps...
This is a very first one, reporting only Sol762 panorama/position.

Position I found appear the same reported from Theseiner and I based previous waypoints/path on his excellent map.
Hope to find enough time/resources to fill the gap from last (Sol651) position, but topography doesn't help... and, yes, I have also to extend MGS background map!

[SigurRosFan]

Marco, nice to see your route maps again.

[nprev]

Should we start a pool, then? I'd prefer not to look on it as a 'how long until Spirit/Opportunity dies' but instead 'how much longer than the nominal mission lifetime will the rovers last?'.

Bob Shaw

A pool, you say, Bob? I must admit that the concept has much more appeal than pools for trivial events like the Super Bowl. You have a concept in mind? I'm in for up to US $10.00.

Gotta say, though, that my money will be on Oppy. Random events aside (such as Spirit's recent wheel failure), Meridiani is obviously a much more benign environment for MERs than Gusev, and therefore I see no logical reason that Oppy won't survive long past Spirit. A "horserace" between the two would be moot.

Yup - Mars Odyssey is doing good relay.

But they didn't have much involvement with the rovers as I understand it.

Doug

Oh, my bad! Who was the prime contractor for the MERs, then?

[mars_armer]

> Oh, my bad! Who was the prime contractor for the MERs, then?

JPL was the prime, as they were for Galileo, Cassini, Mars Pathfinder, and others.

Lockheed Martin's main contribution was the aeroshell (backshell and heatshield).

[dilo]

Ok, here I projected 4 panoramas from previous Sols:

probably alignment and projections are not perfect, due to topography issues, and there are wide missing areas. Due to large area covered, scale is reduced to 20cm/pixel.

I hope to better cover next Sol path ...until Victoria!

[Tesheiner]

Welcome back to this thread, Dilo!

[Tesheiner]

Route map, updated to sol 765.

[Jeff7]

'Elvis has *left* the buildinggggg!'

Close, but ain't no fat lady singing just yet.
Elvis is making preparations to leave the building!

[dvandorn]

Remember, the ellipse boundary line as shown on this unofficial route map is nothing more or less than the width of the line that was arbitrarily used on the landing ellipse map from which the ellipse was transferred onto the route map. (PHEW!)

Assuming the ellipse line is transferred correctly to the route map, then one could make a good argument that the actual ellipse is defined by a line (with length but no width nor depth) which lies exactly halfway between the edges of the arbitrarily-sized line.

By that reckoning, Opportunity exited her landing ellipse during her last drive.

Hooray for Opportunity! Long live MER-B!

-the other Doug

[Tesheiner]

Well, when I included that boundary line in the route map I maintained that big width because of the uncertainty in where would be the real/no-width boundary.

I prefer to think on a sort of diffuse boundary and in such a case consider that the landing ellipse has been left when the whole thick line has been crossed. Given that tosol (766) was planned as driving day too -- the images should be down this evening (MET) -- and assuming a nice move like on previous sols, I would guess that the rover left the boundary today.
Anyway, it's a personal opinion.

[Bill Harris]

The landing ellipse is an abstraction, anyway. The landing point has an uncertainty of +/- x-degrees and where this cone intersects the geoid of the Martian surface it describes an ellipse. Actually, the uncertainty is from the center to the ellipse boundary line. My take is when Oppy crosses the approximate center of the broad brush-stroke used to draw the ellipse boundary she is about to exit the ellipse. More or less.

Let's keep an eye on the bedrock. Ever since we hit the Erebus Highway we have been driving along a series of paleo-crater rims. Now that we are passing beyond large impact structures I'll suppose that the nature of the bedrock will change.

--Bill

[Tesheiner]

Route map, updated to sol 766.

(576k)

As you can see, I added the whole background image up to Victoria. I had to do some tricks in order to reduce the file size and I'm not really happy with the results.
For later updates, I will try to add another background image (below the current on) with drastically less resolution in order to cover the black portion outside the "corridor", if it doesn't compromise the file size.

[akuo]

Cheer for Oppy for crossing where no rover has gone before! May she have great investigations in the Etched Terrain and beyond.