[X] My Assistant

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

A weird looking surface feature.........

No closeups of it form pancam yet though. They seem to have pointed the camera at everything EXCEPT this feature.

[djellison]

An interesting feature - but probably very similar to the outcrop inside Eagle

The cool thing is that opportunity has driven from one target seen on orbit - to another - like Spirit has.



the drive to Endurance doesnt seem that far when you can pull 150 metres in 48 hours.

Doug

[gregp1962]

Is this the crevice that Opp. saw a few days ago. Or, is this the second target Opp has seen since leaving bounce?

[djellison]

It's the same crevice. It arrived after a 100m drive, and has driven about 50 metres along the side of it.

Doug

[jmknapp]

Looking back partway through the 100-m drive, here's a pretty cool navcam shot showing Bounce as well as the parachute & shell in the distance:



Also, the drive along the trench:

[Phil Stooke]

I've ressurected an old thread to post a newly-made polar projection... this is Anatolia, close to Eagle crater. Two partial pans from the MER Notebook Navigator site joined to make one. I am going to work on a detailed map of Anatolia as an experiment for future mapping.

Phil

[Bill Harris]

So long ago and so far away.

Those are truly monster ripples (ripplets? ) that Oppy is crashing over....

Interesting polar pan... Eagle/Bounce to the SW, Endurance on the Eastern horizon. I've been doing a "round-tuit" side project of looking at MOC imagery of the Meridiani area and plotting/marking the anatolia lineations. Somewhat of an academic project, once one plots a few of these things and see that they trend NE/SW one begins to wonder about the focus of the project. But as a geologist I notice lineations as telling a lot about subsurface conditions. In my Appalachian mountain setting, lineations imply tectonic forces but on a desert plain like Meridiani I think that they reflect the surface of the evaporite unit and may offer clues about the depositional environment here.

Another mapping puzzle to work on? Look at the wind direction in this region of Meridiani as suggested by the dust tails behind craters. Unless I've got North mixed up, the wind direction seems to change from place to place.

--Bill

[Phil Stooke]

Here is a polar version of the sol 72 pan at the north end of Anatolia.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

And here's the Sol 71 half-pan in polar form.

I don't have directions all set up properly here. But I want to use these (or larger versions of them) and the vertical projections from the Planetary Image Atlas to assemble a map of the area. This is an experiment at producing a background image for day-to-day route mapping, similar to what Dilo is doing now.

Phil

[Nix]

Unless I've got North mixed up, the wind direction seems to change from place to place.

--Bill

They do change direction. There are orbital images showing the tails on opposite sides of craters.

Nice projections Phil...

Nico

[CosmicRocker]

Although I've lost the reference, I read recently that the wind direction at Meridiani changes seasonally, sometimes coming from the NW and then from the SE.

[Phil Stooke]

Here's a polar half-pan made earlier on Sol 72 than the full pan above.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

... and a pan from Sol 74, omitting the foreground to emphasize distant features. The fracture patterns north of Anatolia show up here. I'll do the full 74 pan soon. Then the goal is to try to knit them all together into a regional map.

Phil

[Nix]

Man I love that sol 72 projection

Can you show a bigger version?

Nico

[Phil Stooke]

OK, I'll try to get it out tonight my time.

Phil