[X] My Assistant

[djellison]

As I see it - they have two options. Drive in and hope to leave. Suicide drive in expecting to stay - or Remote observation only.

Seing as the IDD isnt going to be able to reach the interesting stuff that's on the very steap eastern wall - I doubt they'll drive in - but that's just my opinion.

Take your pick.


Doug

[dvandorn]

It seems obvious from how Squyres was talking at the press briefing yesterday that they are *seriously* considering driving into Endurance. Those layers that lie below the high-sulphur whitish-rock layers are just too great of a temptation for Steve and his cohorts, I think. (I believe I'm going to start calling the whitish rock units "evaporation layers," since their high levels of sulphur and their high but inconsistent levels of such elements as bromine mark them as having been formed or altered during the evaporation of the body of water that used to overlie the plains.)

Now, I'm not positive that I see the extension onto lower-slope wall units of the darker, pre-evaporation layers that Squyres was talking about yesterday. I see something that could be mistaken for such an extension but that seems more obviously to be a portion of the rim that has collapsed into the crater. It's a scalloped-edge feature on the near wall to the right of the current panorama. But the edge of that feature, while it appears to continue the deep bedding that's visible a little further on, actually is the edge of a rim collapse. All we're going to see there, I'm afraid, is the basaltic sand that covers the evaporation layers out on the plains.

At least Squyres was pretty definite that Opportunity will be sent out onto the plains to check out the cracks and dimples (and maybe even some of the fretted terrain to the south) before being committed to a potentially suicidal entry into Endurance. And I was glad to hear that the heat shield impact point is targeted for a visit, too. It just seems to me that the heat shield had to dig a deeper hole than any trenching operation could generate. It will be very instructive to see if it penetrated through the evaporation rock layer or not (though, if that layer is as thick as it appears in Endurance's walls, I'd say that was highly doubtful).

Doug
dvandorn@NOSPAM.mn.rr.com