Spirit Route Map, Small and Large Scales Options

[Phil Stooke]

Here's a preview of something I'm working on for a book proposal after my current one goes in next year.

I am making a set of maps of the whole Spirit route at a standard scale, showing placenames as well as sols. This map is a 500 m square - the whole route up to Home Plate requires 9 maps like this with a slight overlap. For areas which need more detail, such as West Spur, additional high resolution maps will be created, probably by reprojecting surface panoramas as I did with Eagle and Anatolia recently. (They were also experiments for the same purpose, basically to estimate how many pages will be needed for each rover).

The background is poor, but it will be replaced with an MRO image (or a better version of this MOC jpeg) later

Phil

[Tesheiner]

Spirit route map, updated up to sol 717 (714 by Dilo).

(352k)

[general]

New traverse maps:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/tm-spirit/index.html

[RNeuhaus]

The contours on that OSU route map seem to be suggesting block faulting on some of the hills!  That's the first time we have seen anything like that on one of the maps, iirc.

I cannot see a fault. I would like that someone point it out in a picture.

Rodolfo

P.S.
I have enclosed the Spirit traverse map Sol 715 from Marsrovers JPL Web. I traced two white curviline in where it is supposed to be faults.

[Tesheiner]

Spirit route map, updated up to sol 717 (714 by Dilo).

New traverse maps:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/tm-spirit/index.html

Man, I should post my route map version more often!

[Tesheiner]

Route map, up to sol 719.

(572k)

[sattrackpro]

[quote=Tesheiner,Jan 11 2006, 03:14 AM]
Route map, up to sol 719.
- -
Tesh, I'm beginning to worry that we'll not spend much time at Home Plate...

I'm speculating that it will take at least (and that's moving fast) another 7 to 10 days to get to Home Plate - and with little time for doing much probing, another 8 to 10 days to get to a North facing slope. Do you (or anyone) see a route fast enough to get us to Home Plate and to safe wintering ground, in time?

In the link below, I've used a piece of your Route Map to illustrate daily drives - for perhaps 14 days+... and you can see where we may run rather short of time.

380KB image

I'm beginning to wonder if Home Plate will be left for the springtime...

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[sattrackpro]

Well - I ~tried~ to remove the attachment, Tesh - it got there without showing up in the preview - and after the system said that it was too big to add. (That's why I posted the link to an altered smaller image.)

It is ~definitely~ time for bed...

[Tesheiner]

Your proposed path seems reasonable; there are other ones on the "Going to Homeplate" thread and we may be really speaking of some additional 10 driving days until reaching Home Plate.

Little time for science? Dunno.
I can only refer to what was already said by S.S (see here): Home Plate by sol 750 and McCool Hill by sol 800. They are the experts, and for the time being Spirit seems to be on schedule.

[akuo]

Can't see us being in that much of a hurry. You have to remember that this is Mars and with the year being twice as long so are the seasons (though the eccrenticity of the orbit complicates it a bit, southern summers being a bit shorter). We're still in the beginning of autumn.

Looking at helvick's power chart the maximum solar input now is about the same as it was at the end of the primary mission -- and that was when Spirit started her long treck to the hills.

Link to helvick's post with the power chart.

Steve also said that the schedule was to be at HP around sol 750 and getting to the slopes on sol 800. So we are well ahead of that. I'm betting Spirit will spend a good month on the Home plate.

[sattrackpro]

Can't see us being in that much of a hurry.

Thanks! And, thanks too, Tesh...

It was that power graph that collided with the Sol dates of 750 - 800 that had me worried in the first place. But, since then I saw that these power numbers are NOT actual - so the decending lines that go below 'death' are... not real after all. (Frankly, I'm not sure what to make of that graph now.)

Spirit and Oppy both have beaten the odds - enormously. I hope that the guys who have done such a marvelous job in keeping them both healthy so far, continue to do so for many more months. This has been, in my estimation, the most spectacular success ever in planetary exploration, so much so that future attempts will have a hard time meeting expectations based on the marvels these two MER vehicles have continued to provide us with.

[Mongo]

This has been, in my estimation, the most spectacular success ever in planetary exploration, so much so that future attempts will have a hard time meeting expectations based on the marvels these two MER vehicles have continued to provide us with.

They certainly have been fantastic successes. They have provided a wealth of stunning images in addition to new scientific results. I think, though, that it is difficult to directly compare them with other projects that provided outstanding results in other areas.

Voyagers 1 and 2, for instance, provided our first good looks at the Jupiter and Saturn systems, and our only look so far at the Uranus and Neptune systems. Many of the images they sent back are still iconic. Vikings 1 and 2 (including the Orbiters) were another tremendously scientifically productive project. And of course, Cassini/Huygens continues to provide amazing imagery.

The MER project certainly makes the "robotic space exploration Hall of Fame". That's good enough for me.

Bill

P.S. After writing that, I thought "Why not have our own Hall of Fame?" Take the eligible candidates to be all missions that either launched or reached their destination before some cut-off date, and conduct a vote to determine the most successful spacecraft in history -- my vote would probably go to Voyager 2, unless somebody changes my mind. Whichever mission gets the most points is awarded spot #1 on the Unmanned Spaceflight.com Hall of Fame. After additional debate, we have a vote for the #2 spacecraft of all time, and so on.

If there is interest, it should be fairly easy to generate a list of "eligible" candidates, and decide on a ballot -- five entries per ballot on a 5-4-3-2-1 point system could work. The big question would be how long to allow for debate before voting. A week or two seems to be popular in other Internet Halls of Fame.

Another approach would be to conduct a faux chronological vote. For example, have the first election consider only missions that launched before 1970. The second vote would include missions launched in 1971 in addition to the pre-1970 missions, the third would also include 1972 missions, and so on.

[CosmicRocker]

I missed some earlier responses to one of my comments, and am now catching up. In the preview this reply looks terribly large. Would people prefer me to break up such a reply into separate pieces?

I think some of the orbital shots indicate the same

I was thinking the same, but now I am not so sure. The orbital images suggest all kinds of faulting in this region. I tried to find some panoramas of the hillside in question, but I couldn't find any useful views of where I thought these "faults" were.

No - there's a 'ripping' to the stereo interpolation there - that's not real features. - some go straight thru El Dorado, and we KNOW what that's like.

Doug

Good point, Doug. I hadn't noticed that earlier. I am beginning to suspect that Bill may be correct, in that the gridding software they are using is having some issues. Perhaps that is why they did not use the topos in the latest map. It would be nice to see the control points that were used to grid this topographic map. I don't know if that topo map was made from MOLA data, stereoscopy, or both.

I cannot see a fault. I would like that someone point it out in a picture.

Rodolfo

P.S.
I have enclosed the Spirit traverse map Sol 715 from Marsrovers JPL Web. I traced two white curviline in where it is supposed to be faults.

Rodolfo: I was referring to the linear jogs or offsets in the topographic lines on the south side of Husband Hill, in the map located here. From where do you get the two faults proposed in your image?

...
This has been, in my estimation, the most spectacular success ever in planetary exploration, so much so that future attempts will have a hard time meeting expectations based on the marvels these two MER vehicles have continued to provide us with.

...and on a completely different subject, I have to echo sattrackpro's comment. They truly set the bar very high with this mission. I would have to imagine that the spectacular successes of the MERs would pretty much ensure that many of the engineers, scientists, and technicians responsible for it will become a part of future missions. I am considering quitting my job and making a pilgrimage to Mount Ithaca to sacrifice a lamb (My first-born son refuses to cooperate.) in order to get a job on one of the next missions.

[Bill Harris]

Tom, big replys are OK with me; it takes as much time to read three small messages as one large message.

I've had training in gridding software, and the offsets look like common glitches, which should have been corrected by the operator before going to a final map. What happens is that there are anomalous values in the location and elevation data input values, the software doesn't know how to handle them and it makes certain pre-programmed assumptions on how to handle this and sometimes comes up with these odd jumps.

"Gridding software" is a computer program that takes a dataset of x, y and z values (length, width and elevation) and by sophisticated mathmatical interpolation, creates a grid or mesh. The viewing part of the software can take this grid dataset, view it from any angle, rotate it, give it vertical exaggeration, create topographic contour lines and overlay it onto a photographic image.

Pathfinder/Sojourner was the "proof of concept" mission for the mobile lander idea, but our Rovers are the first time we have had long-term mobile robots on Mars and, given that this was the initial foray, the mission has been a resounding (and astounding) success.

I'm close to retirement. I may sell my dogs, move and live in a packing crate, and do volunteer work...

--Bill

[Phil Stooke]

MOLA is far too low in resolution to help make a topo map like the one discussed here - two orders of magnitude too low, probably. It can only just resolve the hills, but not show significant detail. The contour map is based on stereo analysis of MOC images - if you try to overlay one MOC on another in a program like Photoshop you can easily see differences caused by the relief and slightly different viewing directions. But in areas where there are few obvious control points - Eldorado being a good example - the stereo matching and bundle adjustment software will give poor results. Also, there have been serious issues in trying to create DEMs from MOC images because it's a scanning camera with an ever-changing viewpoint, not a framing camera which takes an image in a moment.

Phil