Cape York - Northern Havens, Sol 2780 - 2947 Options

[mhoward]

Heh heh. The sixties live on. Here's one looking east.

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[MoreInput]

You mean Oppy is now on a psychodelic trips these days ?
After eight years of working alone in the wide meridiani place I think that's just necessary.

[brellis]

Looks like Pear Blossom Highway!

[Matt Lenda]

From the report...

But Opportunity is in new terrain and as this mission's luck would have it, Mars whipped up a gust or two last weekend, giving the rover a bump that pushed her power levels to about one-third full capacity. Now, all fingers are crossed that Mars will help March blow in with something of a little gusty roar.

There was a small dust cleaning! It happened over a couple of sols. I should reiterate "small" -- it was significant but not enough to, say, let us drive away.

-m

[centsworth_II]

If I read dilo's graph right, it looks like about a 10% gain. From ~275 to ~310 Whrs. Below is a compressed version. The full graph is here.

[PDP8E]

Here is the interim result of a software test to re-focus the close-in hardware on OPPY, and to leave the rest of the image alone. I used a modified Lucy-Richardson 'focuser' and an out-of-focus 'finder (low freq regions and [when i had to] an explicit don't bother this region tool...

[tanjent]

How to account for the bare stripe in between the two dusty stripes?
Is it -

a. an illusion due to light effects,
b. indicative of dust-laden breezes arriving from two different prevailing directions
c. due to a change in rover orientation with a constant wind direction
d. due to a tendency of dust deposits to fall away when they reach a certain thickness.

Someone knows the answer to this, I am sure.

[fredk]

At first I thought the bright stripe running down just right of centre was specularly reflected sun/skylight shining through dust. But the L2 seems to show the (specular) reflected light confined to near the top. So it looks like the stripes are due to different thicknesses of dust.

Dust tends to accumulate slowly and come off fast, during gusts. So I'd guess the dust accumulated from many directions, giving smooth coverage, but was removed in certain stripes depending on the rover orientation during the gusts.

But a lot of dust was deposited during the dust storm, so there may be a depositional stripe associated with that too. Maybe someone could put together a montage of LGA images through the years...

[walfy]

Close-up from Sol 2887:

[fredk]

Another lovely low-Sun sequence coming down:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...2M1.JPG?sol2888

[Astro0]

Some nice views of Opportunity's deck on Sol 2886.

[James Sorenson]

While I'm catching up on the Greeley Panorama right now, I just had to stitch together that Gorgeous sequence of lowlight images on Sol-2888.

[Astro0]

A colour (L257) view from Sol 2884.
I don't do colour often, so this is a bit of an experiment.

[James Sorenson]

Here is a version of the Greeley Panorama taken through the L2 Filter to show the current progress of downlinked images. I hope they can do another rover deck pan at this location so it can be stitched together with this panorama.

[Matt Lenda]

Another lovely low-Sun sequence coming down:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...2M1.JPG?sol2888

We're trying for another one of those "spot Oppy's shadow on the hill's shadow in the distance" shots. It's a real eye-grabber for public outreach. The previous one had misaligned shadows, etc. that made it less cool.

-m