Some Statistics for Spirit & Oppy, As the journey continues on Mars Options

[climber]

Some statistics as on Dec 31st 2006
Total Pictures : 170.026
Total Sols : 2110 (11.7 times more than scheduled)
Pics/Sol/Rover : 81
Total distance : 16.684 meters (13.9 times more than scheduled)
meter/Sol/Rover : 7.9
Cost/sol (Assuming 800 millions USD) : 379.147 USD
Post/UMSF’ers/Sol/Rover :

[dvandorn]

Interesting... the MERs are about 200 sols from individually equaling the time the Viking 2 lander remained operational, and the total number of sols for both rovers is about 200 sols short of the time the Viking 1 lander was operational.

In about 700 sols or so, if the rovers last that long, they will have equaled the total operational time of both Viking landers.

Pretty durned impressive for solar-powered wheeled vehicles...

-the other Doug

[djellison]

After all the extensions - it's more like $900m I think.

Doug

[climber]

After all the extensions - it's more like $900m I think.

Doug

OK Doug! So, assuming $900m, on March 15th, the price per sol will be exactly $400.000 as total sol will get to 2250.
Here are other stats about how long it took to take 25k pictures from the begining of the mission. I miss the date of the first 25k's and assumed it was linear. If somebody know the date, I'll appreciate.
Also number of pictures per sol were we can see summer-winter variations.
It's an excel file :

 Stat_rovers_march_07.xls ( 17K ) Number of downloads: 1610

[dilo]

Thanks for the update on image statistics, Climber (about Excel file, pls could you better explain the meaning of the plots? what do we see on horizontal axis?).
Now is time to update also my odometry statistics (same scale):

[climber]

Getting close to yet more milestones!

If my excel file is working as it should work, I calculated that, tomorrow, june 16th we'll have accumulated 2500 Earth days on Mars while 2500 Sols will be on July 20th which could be more or less when Spirit will have shot 100.000 pictures.
On june 18th, the difference of minutes between Earth and Mars since Spirit landing will be 50.000 (nearly 35 days).
More?
OK : since end of May, the total cumulated distance is over 18 kms, i.e. 30 times what has been scheduled.

[djellison]

Not that far from their second Martian Birthday either.

Doug

[climber]

Yep, not that far!
September 29th for Spirit and October 9th for Oppy

Regarding the difference between sols and days :we have a 10 Million $ positive difference if we calculate the cost (per sol or day) in Earth days... which seams fair to me since, if we use "external references" it could be VERY expensive to land on Venus and very cheap on Jupiter!

[stevesliva]

If only we could get humans to Mars for only $400,000 per day! What a bargain, especially in light of a weeklong trip to LEO costing the tourists $20,000,000.

[dilo]

Spirit just reached Sol1400, which is the limit for my last odometry plot, so enjoy this last update with old scale...

I guess Spirit figure will not change very much in the last months . Hope about Oppy restart, which is full of energy!

Another update for the number of pictures sent back from both rovers, the average was exactly 100 pics/day in the last 9 months (higher than previous year):

[Tom Tamlyn]

OK Doug! So, assuming $900m, on March 15th, the price per sol will be exactly $400.000 as total sol will get to 2250.

"[T]he number that most haunted me and Pete ... was the one you got if you took the cost of the mission and divided it by the number of sols we expected to operate on the surface. It came to about $4 million a sol. ... Whatever we built, and whatever we managed to do with it, the result was going to have to be worth at least that much."

Steve Squyres, Roving Mars, p. 103.

TTT

[ElkGroveDan]

In truth the operating costs have climbed as well. As I recall the $900 million was as of launch time including normal mission support. To get a true figure we need to add up the costs of all the mission extensions and also the DSN time, if that is not part of those extended mission costs.

[djellison]

$850m was that figure - I just added the $50m as an estimate of the extensions to make $900m

Doug

[ElkGroveDan]

Well however we slice it, they've been a great bargain.

[Guest_PhilCo126_*]

Talking about MER statistics, anyone know where to find a high resolution version of this MER 1000 sols logo?

[climber]

Some statistics as on jan 31st 2008
Total Pictures : 207.000
Total Sols : 2880 (16 times more than scheduled)
Pics/Sol/Rover : 72
Total distance : 19200 m (~12 Miles) (16 times more than scheduled)
meter/Sol/Rover : 6.6
Cost/sol (Assuming 900 millions USD) : 315.000 USD

Oppy's now over 100.000 pictures
Just think of this : 72 pictures/Sol/Rover represent 2 old roll films per sol/rover
I can't imagine the size of the container (not talking about processing) the rovers would have to have carryied if Digital camera would'nt exit yet !

[dilo]

Another update for our poor old friends on Mars...

I added an inset odometry plot in order to show the tiny progress in last year!
About pictures, due to energy problems the contribution from Spirit is very small (only 18 pics/sol in last 2 months!).

[climber]

Thanks Dilo. I like the abrv months in Italian
Let see what happen this month with Euro 2008 (BTW my father was born in Piacenza anyway)

[dilo]

Merci, climber... are you referring to UEFA Championship??? If so, I'm not very expert of soccer, sorry!

[dilo]

No major odometry changes, for the moments... so I report only updated pics plot:

Incidentally, the cumulative pic quote resemble very much to a parabola, stalling one year from now... let's hope that Spirit awakening and, especially, new Oppy journey to EC will change this trend!

[climber]

Here is the updated .xls file I use to follow Rovers progress.
I've got some reliable infos regarding restricted sols so, I added a column for Oppy to show where they'll be. Please don't take this for granted since it depends on when the downlinks happens and it'll have to be ajusted as we go. Anyway, it should work at least for the coming month or so.

 Rovers_follow_up.xls ( 556.5K ) Number of downloads: 1583


Enjoy

[dilo]

Thanks Climber, interesting file.
I would like to integrate these data with my datasheet.
In the meantime, this is my updated odometry for Opportunity ... I hope to see a strong increase of such statistics in next week!

[climber]

Oppy get full lead now:

+ Oppy overtook Spirit for total distance on March 19 th 2006 : 6836m vs 6807m
+ Oppy overtook Spirit for total number of pictures on October 8 th 2008 : 110864 vs 110840


Edited: for a 900M$ basis, cost per second will drop down 3$ on december 2nd.
I guess we're actually over 900M$. Doug, any better estimate for, say, 31 december 2008?

[alan]

Conjunction is coming up on December 6. How long will the communications be disrupted around this date.

[climber]

Last one last 2 weeks total but I'll say it depends on the actual geometry, i.e. how close to the sun Mars will be seen from the Earth. Anyway, I don't expect more than 2 weeks really.

[Guest_PhilCo126_*]

Longest single-sol drive distances:

Opportunity:
Sol 410 = 220 meters (722 feet)
Sol 362 = 157 meters (512 feet)
Sol 1663 = 153 meters (500 feet)

Spirit:
Sol 125 = 124 meters (409 feet)

[djellison]

There are several drives between your first and second place distances there.

[dilo]

There are several drives between your first and second place distances there.

In chronological order (only above 100m):
Sol daily odometry
70 100
82 141
362 157
383 177
384 104
385 109
408 190
410 220
412 183
413 175
414 183
423 109
433 151
1663 153
1666 129
Happy to see again such big distances!

[centsworth_II]

1666 129
Happy to see again such big distances!

Aren't there five 100m plus drives since sol 1666?

[Guest_PhilCo126_*]

Opportunity:

Sol 410 = 220 meters
Sol 1690 = 216 meters

[dilo]

Time to update Oppy Odometry:

This trend is very encouraging, with weekly average steadly above 25 meters.

[djellison]

What would their Martian third birthday's be?

[climber]

On dec 2nd, assuming total mission costs at 900M*, cost per second will be exactly = 3$
Just about that time, total pictures will be very close to 225.000 (source JPL MER web site), giving a cost per picture of 4000$ (again at 900M*)
Note that, removing sundial pics out of the count will increase considerably the cost per "regular" pictures

*: that was your estimation Doug, one year ago, so it's probably "a bit" more. So, if not on dec 2nd, those stats will be moved a few days, roughly... up to their birthday.

[djellison]

My $900m is, I think, slightly high. Scott mentioned something like $890 or there abouts in his awesome Mars 3.0 talk at Gnomedex

[jamescanvin]

What would their Martian third birthday's be?

Plugging Spirit's landing day into the Exploratorium birthday tool gives 24/08/2009 as her third birthday on Mars.

[briv1016]

Does anyone have an exact date for when the MER combined mission duration becomes greater then the Viking combined mission duration? My rough calculations put it at Dec 29; but maybe some with more precise numbers can get a more exact date.

[RoverDriver]

Does anyone have an exact date for when the MER combined mission duration becomes greater then the Viking combined mission duration? My rough calculations put it at Dec 29; but maybe some with more precise numbers can get a more exact date.

From wikipedia I have:

Vk1 lasted 2245 Sols
Vk2 lasted 1281 Sols

That is a total of 3526 Sols. On Sun Dec 28, 2008 MER-A will be at Sol 1773 and MER-B will be on Sol 1753.

Paolo

[briv1016]

From wikipedia I have:

Vk1 lasted 2245 Sols
Vk2 lasted 1281 Sols

That is a total of 3526 Sols. On Sun Dec 28, 2008 MER-A will be at Sol 1773 and MER-B will be on Sol 1753.

Paolo

A bit of a belated announcement but Spirit and Opportunity have not surpassed Viking 1 and 2 in combined mission duration.

[climber]

Reading Scott Maxwell "deary", I realise that he was assuming a cost of 4M$ a day. He didn't know it was 250.000$ a day actualy.
I hope to update this amount in the future and be as wrong as Scott was

[climber]

Vk1 lasted 2245 Sols
Vk2 lasted 1281 Sols
That is a total of 3526 Sols. On Sun Dec 28, 2008 MER-A will be at Sol 1773 and MER-B will be on Sol 1753.
Paolo

Please correct me if I'm wrong:
Sojourner lasted 92 Sols (?)
Phoenix lasted 151 Sols (?)
Adding this to the Vikings = 3769 Sols
Spirit + Oppy will, hopefully, surpass ALL other landers added sols on May 3rd of this year... and individually by late August 2014

[RoverDriver]

Please correct me if I'm wrong:
Sojourner lasted 92 Sols (?)
Phoenix lasted 151 Sols (?)
Adding this to the Vikings = 3769 Sols
Spirit + Oppy will, hopefully, surpass ALL other landers added sols on May 3rd of this year... and individually by late August 2014

Hopefully my math is correct. Assuming both rovers will survive until May MER will surpass the combined sols of all landers/rovers (except MER) on May 2, 2009. Assuming only MERB survives next winter, MERB sol 2245 is May 18 2010.

Paolo

[lyford]

MER will surpass the combined sols of all landers/rovers (except MER) on May 2, 2009.

Surpassing all missions including MER would really be an accomplishment!

[climber]

Checking the rovers mileage, I can tell that Oppy is ~250m short of having roved twice as much as Spirit.
Another 3-4 drive.

[Deimos]

Please correct me if I'm wrong:
Vk1 lasted 2245 Sols
Vk2 lasted 1281 Sols
Sojourner lasted 92 Sols (?)
Phoenix lasted 151 Sols (?)

Wikipedia knows all. But ...

VL1 was successfully commanded (to do the wrong thing) on sol 2252. It landed on sol 0, so that's 2253 sols of operations. The place that messed up the sols also messed up the Earth date (11/19, 1982, not 11/13). VL2 lasted 1316.1 days, or 1280.9 sols, so I'd buy 1281 (even though it was probably 1 more, with the 0.9 divided between partial first and last sols). [JPL Pub 82-107]

Pathfinder was under ground command for 83 sols (1-83), and experienced the undervoltage trying to wake up for sol 84. Some level of communication followed, but ground command was not reasserted and the science mission had ended.

Umm, Sojourner lasted 83 sols, too, and was lost when its communications subsystem (ie, MPF) failed. Speculation about what happened on/after sol 92 is just speculation.

Phoenix successfully finished sols 0 through 151 inclusive: 152 sols. (Again, signals without command authority followed.)

So, 3769 combined sols without Sojourner, 3852 with. So with 2 MERs, I get 2009 June 14 around 1900 UTC for a DTE or nominal beep from Opportunity or about 5 hours later for a UHF pass (to exceed all other landers/rovers). Actually, I get May 3 without Sojourner, with other errors canceling.

[climber]

From TPS monthly report:"“We have some commands that have minimum and maximum time ranges in them and the maximum range was January 1, 2010,” she informed. “Obviously, we're coming up on that, so R9.3 extends the maximum range, to noon on January 1, 2020. If we are still going after that,we'll need to do another software patch." The new, R9.3 software has been working “just fine” on both rovers, she added."

This will be Sol 5679 for Spirit

[ElkGroveDan]

Wikipedia knows all.

Not when Ted Stryk has been around.

[dilo]

"...on January 1, 2020. If we are still going after that,we'll need to do another software patch."

This will be Sol 5679 for Spirit

Or about 50 Km odometry for Opportunity (extrapolating first 5 years average)!

[dilo]

Time for a general update!

EDIT: someone highlighted wrong axis in the first plot, now I corrected title and added second axis for daily odometry.

[Burmese]

Oh, go ahead and connect the dots on that second one...want to better visualize that power spike by Spirit!

[climber]

June 24th 2009 doesn't seams to be a special day for Spirit. It is indeed.
It'll be Sol 1946...which will also be (Earth) Day 2000 since landing.

[dilo]

Update on pictures and Whrs:

thanks to recent light "burst", Spirit approached Oppy after surpass almost 1 year ago!)

[climber]

Thanks Dilo,

I love your date setting in Italian....

[imipak]

It almost looks like some cosmic joker's sending us a message via Spirit's power curve

[ilbasso]

I'm still waiting for someone on UMSF to put together a graph in anaglyph form. I'm surprised we don't see more of that sort of thing.

[climber]

Other milestones,
Last Oppy drive put the total odometer for both MER above 25 kilometers. (24969 + (~) 70m
Also,
On 09/09/09 (or so ), total number of pictures reached 250.000.
This is ~62 pictures per sol and per Rover or 3600$ per picture... if all costs have ever to be considered for taking pictures only.
Last 25.000 pictures have been shot in 251 sols.

[briv1016]

On 09/09/09 (or so ), total number of pictures reached 250.000.

Does that include the double counting of M1,2,3 etc versions of the same picture?

[PDP8E]

of the 250,000 images:

...109,689 were of the sun dial
...132,275 were of the sun

[fredk]

That's a surprize. That only leaves about 10 000 images not of the sun or sundial! And a lot of those must be navcam odometry frames - I wonder how many?

[djellison]

I think PDP8E was being sarcastic.

[PDP8E]

hey doug,
guilty...

[fredk]

Thanks for clarifying that, PDP! It would be interesting though to know how many frames have been sundial/sun/odometry. I could imagine writing a script that jumps through the jpl jpeg pages and counts them up. (Not downloading each image, of course.) Odometry would be easy - just add up the navcam subframes downsampled frames (match "EDN" in filename). Sun/sundial could be done by matching on the img width and height attributes...

[climber]

We all know that odometry means weels turn and not real kilometers and that the sun dials can't be stealed by the Martians without been seen since they are shot so many times . Well, I didn't ear that the MER sun pictures are used by Soho's team either.

Anyway I like the milestone 25 kilometres, 250.000 pictures, 4000 sols, 6 martian years coming along nearly altogether at the same time.

[fredk]

The more I think about it the more useful it would be to do a thorough count of images. One other use would be to find all the images that appear on exploratorium but not on the jpl gallery pages. Has anyone else noticed that there are images missing from the jpl pages? For example, these images are not on the jpl pages:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...ARP1979R0M1.JPG
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...B8P2544L7M1.JPG
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/fo...E5P1110L0M1.JPG
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/pa...E5P2550L7M1.JPG
(these are from sols 1961 and 1972 (Oppy) and 1990 (Spirit)).

These were all released on August 9th and 11th on exploratorium, but never made it to the jpl gallery, obviously because of some glitch (August 10th images are missing too). But it would be good to have a list of all such missing gallery images, even though the images are public at exploratorium. The jpl gallery is a great, easy way to look for old images from some particular sol.

[Deimos]

I figured I'd check the stats myself. This is based on images downlinked, excluding multiple versions, and doesn't rely on the image browsing sites, but I cannot vouch for absolute completeness. I also am ignoring thumbnails and looking only at the EFF, ESF, and EDN types. I see a total of 120,604 Spirit images, 124,728 Opportunity images, for 245k images. That adds up to 261 Gbits (2.5% of which is from thumbnails and engineering/calibration data) as downlinked. Image number by camera (A/B) is: Pancam 78,929/80,972; MI 5,824/5,996; engineering--the rest. Among Pancam, 8,806/13,298 are of the Sun or sky; 16,482/15,739 are of the cal targets (aka sundial). Those two categories add up to <4% of total Pancam bits downlinked. The rovers have taken over 300,000 images (147,166/160,573); the difference between these numbers and the first set comes from images taken but deleted on board (e.g., some empty dust devil movies) or taken only in thumbnail form (or maybe some missed in my count?). By type, Pancam images are mostly EFF or ESF (like Sun and sundial), MI are almost all EFF, and engineering images are mostly EFF or EDN (like autonav).

* The numbers are as of mid-day (UTC) 15 Sept. 2009 (probably sols 2026/2006 PM downlink).

[edit: fixed Mbits to Gbits. What's 3 orders of magnitude among friends...]

[PDP8E]

Hey Deimos,

I was finishing up my lunch and doodling how to approach an Exploratorium count with a perl and shell script when your posting came across the wires! Thanks for the independent numbers. You rock!

[fredk]

Agreed, very cool to have those numbers, thanks Deimos. Roughly a third of all pancam frames are sun/sky/sundial. (Should the total volume be perhaps Gbits rather than Mbits?)

[briv1016]

With this latest week of drives, the combined driving distance of Spirit and Opportunity is now 26.62 km which beats the Apollo 16 rover driving distance of 26.55 km.

Just for reference:

Vehical / Distance

Lunokhod 2 / 37.00 km
Apollo 17 rover / 35.89 km
Apollo 15 rover / 27.76 km
Apollo 16 rover / 26.55 km
Opportunity (2056) / 18.89 km
Lunokhod 1 / 10.50 km
Spirit (2076) / 7.73 km
Sojourner / ?

[climber]

Interesting figures indeed.

We've now (last status nov 5th) roved 6209m since Victoria which added nearly 50% more odometry since there (started at 12678m).

[Guest_PhilCo126_*]

I believe that Sojourner (the little rover that could...) drove a total distance of about 110 meters... longest drive during one sol was about 7 meters? How far am I off ?

[Hungry4info]

The total distance will never be known. After Pathfinder died, contact between Sojourner and Pathfinder ceased. Sojourner was programmed such that if this ever happened (like if Sojourner wandered behind a rock or something), to circle Pathfinder, trying to establish contact. This would continue until either Sojourner re-established contact, or died.

Pathfinder died, so contact was probably never re-established. Sojourner spent the rest of its days, unattended to by anyone or anything, circling its lifeless companion, trying desperately to contact it. All in vain.

[djellison]

Actually - we can be fairly confident about how far Sojourner got after pathfinder died, as there's a fairly convincing identification via HiRISE of Sojourners location. We had an entire thread here about it- a pool of where we thought Sojourner would be

[Hungry4info]

Sojourner has been found? I thought its location remained unknown =o. Apparently I didn't keep up with it.

And how did you resolve the issue of not knowing how many times Sojourner circled Pathfinder?

[djellison]

It's fairly clear from the location that it drove from its last know position, in a straight line partially back towards the lander, and stopped.

In a perfect world - it would have circled the lander. But the pathfinder landing site was far from a perfect world.

post 70+ in this thread - http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...irise&st=60

[climber]

On november 20th total Sols was 4160.
If one devides 900M$ by 4160x84600 (Number of second per Earth day), he'll find that costs of 1 rover second hit 2.5$.
Nominal mission was above 52$

[Deimos]

Keep in mind that the whole 'Bambi circling its dead mother' imagery was always more poetic than predictive. The code said to return to the lander; the result of certain keep-outs was that circling would occur on perfect terrain. But where Sojourner was on sol 83, Ender was on the most likely first direction. That is significant because Ender & Wedge almost ended Sojourner's travels much earlier, with a rover driver threatening to turn off all safety checks and command enough wheel turns to grind the rock to dust if that's what it took to move again. That terrain, the best entrance to the Rock Garden, was nearly non-navigable. An unattended rover with fault protections (tilt, etc) on had zero chance of passage. (My guess in '97 was right against Ender--wouldn't have won the pool, but close.)

Note that Sojourner got stuck somewhere around 6x nominal mission. The response to both Opportunity and Spirit being stuck has been much more cautious, despite being even further "past warranty". I think the real explanation is a somewhat different culture (despite a similar cast & crew); equally, though, it is clear that the MERs each had more future potential from continued roving, compared to Sojourner with the Rock Garden abandoned.

Also, I have 7 m (sol) and 104 m (mission--before the last couple m) for Sojourner.

[nprev]

That's an interesting perspective, Deimos. Would you say this culture change is a result of increased experience (and confidence) with Mars rover operations in general, or increased maturation of the players , or perhaps a liitle of both?

All teasing aside, though, Sojourner was a secondary vehicle with admittedly far less capability then the MERs so its premature loss would not have been the end of the Pathfinder mission, just a degradation. This would probably foster a tendency to take greater risks with it if the potential rewards seemed at all achievable.

[dilo]

Update on pictures and Whrs, in occasion of 6th anniversary:

As usual, on the left plot green curve shows cumulative pictures (Spirit only) and red is total (both rovers). Blue dotted is average pics/day from both.
Right plot shows energy in whr/sol, decay slope for Spirit is really worring...

[climber]

Spirit is less than one mission duration away from breaking Viking 2 duration of 2245 sols
Fingers crossed.

[Tesheiner]

Fingers crossed?!?
Nah! 90 days will be a piece of cake!

[climber]

100% agree. What I was thinking was that if she sleeps at that time and dies before spring come, we'll never know if she made it.
But I'm on the optimistic side too; no doubt she'll make it and rove again.

[eoincampbell]

I trust the Sun will look after Spirit
Thanks for those intriguing stats Climber...

[climber]

3 milestones rounded up at the end of January 2010!
Oppy reaches 12 miles
27 km total for the Rovers
Which is 45 times more than scheduled

Also, there are more than 62 days differences between Sols and Days since landing. Except Scott Maxwell , they all must be happy they did synchronise a while ago

[dilo]

New update.

I'm starting to worry about Spirit power...

[Stu]

Scott Maxwell Tweeted:

"Below ~140W-hr/sol, we're power-negative & start dipping into batteries. Too many sols at that level & we hibernate. "

Hang in there, gal...

[nprev]

Hoo boy. Deus ex Machina!!!

[Stu]

"Don't bet against Spirit"... <---- good advice, she's a tough one.

[dilo]

Below ~140W-hr/sol, we're power-negative & start dipping into batteries. Too many sols at that level & we hibernate.

Here we go (139Whr on sol 2203):

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[Astro0]

@marsroverdriver mentioned that as IIRC, Spirit is down to 133whr as of March 22 (~ sol2210)
Hang in there girl!

[Reed]

Here we go (139Whr on sol 2203):

This was mentioned in the spirit thread, but probably worth mentioning here. 140Whr is no longer the threshold for hibernation:

Brilliant uplink team found way to shave Spirit's energy needs; can get by w/120ish now. Might stave off hibernation another couple weeks!

[jamescanvin]

Wikipedia knows all. But ...

VL1 was successfully commanded (to do the wrong thing) on sol 2252. It landed on sol 0, so that's 2253 sols of operations. The place that messed up the sols also messed up the Earth date (11/19, 1982, not 11/13).

Mark,

Sorry for replying to such an old post, but as Spirit and Opportunity are now closing in on the VL-1 record I have been trying to understand exactly what the record is.

While VL-1 was, as you say, given the faulty commands on sol 2252, as far as I can tell there was no response to that command and of course no subsequent response at all. At the time communications sessions were only being done approximately weekly, so as far as I can tell the last time that anything was actually heard from VL-1 was the previous DSN session back on sol 2245 (the date that most sources give for EOM)

I guess the question is: Is the end-of-mission, the day we broke it, or the day we last heard from it?

James

[vikingmars]

Mark, ...I guess the question is: Is the end-of-mission, the day we broke it, or the day we last heard from it ? James

I was just back in France but contacted the following day after we received no downlink from VL1... It's really sol 2245. We all agreed on this Sol date at JPL as the most relevant for the end of mission date : i.e. the last transmission received from VL1 (with latest images and meteorological data from Sol 2238)
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=156850

[climber]

If I understand Eduardo's Oppy's route map, on Sol 2188, Oppy reached the most western point of her whole journey... since she'll rove east from now on.

[fredk]

Oppy reached the most western point of her whole journey...

Until, that is, she's done with Endeavour and Iazu, and then heads back west to Bopolu and then farther into Miyamoto...

[climber]

As a coincidence, half a mission ago, on ~sol 1100 she was on her most Eastern point so far, and yes, she's supposed to challenge this very soon.
What about showing your BLACK MAN at Miyamoto for scale, fredk?

[climber]

I checked out the JPL Rover website on the pictures section: for the first time since landing, Oppy shows more Sols than Spirit: 2209 vs 2208

[dilo]

Update:

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[climber]

Sorry I missed this one 2 weeks ago.
On sol 2218, April 21st 2010, Oppy from Victoria surpassed Total Spirit mileage.
On previous drive Total distance was 20385m (source Mer website) and since Oppy left Victoria at 12678m, the traverse was 7707m.
Total for Spirit is 7730m and Oppy sol 2218 was over 60m (source Eduardo's map).
This gives a pretty nice prespective of what has already been accomplished during the traverse.

[NW71]

This gives a pretty nice prespective of what has already been accomplished during the traverse.

I guess this really does give an insight into how you break down a daunting task into small, manageable chunks. 19km in an ageing rover appears impossible - but by taking it day by day the impossible can now be seen in the camera lens, growing larger with every driving sol. By my rough calculations (and please correct me if I'm wrong, Fredk, Eduardo, Stu etc) although she has covered more ground than Spirit since leaving Victoria, Oppy has still only (only!) covered about 7,300 metres, as at sol 2226, of the 19km route to Endeavour crater (that is about 38.4% of the journey - I wish they would still show that bar on the maps!)

This just gives one pause for thought on the magnitude of this trek doesn't it? Every day that Oppy drives, whether it be 10 mtrs or 100 just keeps eating away at the task.

I'd be interested to know how others visualise this distance. Personally, I do it in two ways. Firstly, I think where I could be if I drove from my house as far as Oppy has travelled? - In my case this would take me into the neighbouring county! Secondly, re the trip to Endeavour, I see the 11,700 mtrs as just over 29 laps of a full size running track still to go.

As ever - Go Oppy!

Neil

[Poolio]

I think that these numbers aren't quite right. The 12678m figure quoted by climber probably comes from this JPL update, but that number corresponds to the odometry at the end of sol 1687. That's several long drives into the journey, which began on sol 1683. The same update notes that Opportunity was already 314 meters along at that point, bringing the total odometry to 8021m as of sol 2218.

Personally I still like to think of the journey as having started from Duck Bay. My "records" (I use that term loosely) indicate that that would add another 565 meters. Estimating the last three drives at 75 meters combined, said "records" look like this as of today (sol 2238), stage by stage:

CODE

STAGE DISTANCE START END TOTAL ODOMETRY
Start Duck Bay 11,797.84 meters
Stage 0 565.11 m Duck Bay Cape Agulhas 12,362.95 meters
Stage 1 1254.38 m Cape Agulhas Santorini 13,617.33 meters
Stage 2 1434.11 m Santorini Resolution 15,051.44 meters
Stage 3 857.49 m Resolution Kasos 15,908.93 meters
Stage 4 803.53 m Kasos Absecon 16,712.46 meters
Stage 5 516.17 m Absecon Block Island 17,229.16 meters
Stage 6 1698.40 m Block Island Marquette 18,927.56 meters
Stage 7 505.28 m Marquette Concepción 19,432.84 meters
Stage 8 1238.53 m Concepción 20,671.37 meters

TOTAL 8873.53 m

[NW71]

Thanks Poolio - I'm more than happy to be corrected!

If we take Duck Bay as the starting point as you suggest, are we still looking at a total journey of 19km or do we have an update on that figure as well?

Neil