[X] My Assistant

[alan]

Place your bets. When will Oppy be free of this dune. Pick the sol when all of the wheels are out of the trench and on top of the soil.
I'll start by picking sol 490

[CosmicRocker]

I really enjoy having some cold, hard data to play with. In particular, I like to plot data in ways that help me make sense of it. Dot.dk already posted the data in a really interesting plot of cumulative meters driven versus cumulative centimeters advanced.

I'd like to post two other ways to look at the data. This first plot is a simple scatter plot of the centimeters of progress made in each drive attempt versus meters driven, rather than the cumulative values. (Please note that my graph plots centimeters advanced on the Y axis and meters driven on the X axis. I realize this is the reverse of the convention dot.dk used, but I had already made my graphs and I am too tired to change that right now.)

This kind of graph allows one to calculate the slope of the best fit line to all the data points. The slope of that line represents the average advancement efficiency ratio of all drive atempts so far, and it is essentially equal to the 0.5% that has been published. The R-squared value on the plot indicates the data are not widely scattered.


The second graph is even more interesting, I think. It displays that ratio for each Sol on which there was a drive attempt. It's not a pretty picture. Progress was best when Opportunity initially tried to back out, and it has sytematically gotten worse all the way through to sol 475. You can see the 0.5% plateau between sols 468 and 472, but it drops off after the no-drive problem they had on sol 473.

Sorry for the lengthy discussion, but this looked significant to me.

**Edited to embed the actual graphs into this post. These are the same images that are in the links.

Attached thumbnail(s)