[X] My Assistant

[elakdawalla]

Over in the Roving Mars IMAX thread the suggestion was made that we should storyboard our own MER movie and show them what they should have done. One of the other writers at the Society is currently assembling an absolutely enormous month-by-month retrospective on the last two years of both missions that probably no one except UMSF diehards will be able to slog through, but you guys should love it. The retrospective will be posted as a news story but what I want to do is to take it and turn it into a feature in the MER section of our site that follows the rovers' missions on Mars from site to site and traverse to traverse. But I'll need some help.

The main help I'm asking for is: how best to split the stories of both rovers into manageable chunks? You couldn't possibly tell the whole story on one Web page; you'll need to divide it, and if you divide it it makes sense to me to divide it based on geography. For Oppy you could begin with the interior of Eagle Crater, (though that might be kind of a big chunk), and then maybe make a divide at sol 57 when she exited, have the next section cover the traverse to Endurance, and then go on to the next section on the exterior of Endurance at sol 95, and so on. I need help identifying good "chunks," and which sols / calendar dates they apply to (and for the technically inclined, a sidebar could list the SCLK and site/drive ranges for each chunk). Then the fun of illustrating can begin. We'll show those IMAX folks what they should have done.


Anybody have ideas to offer?

--Emily

[odave]

What would also be nifty for us MER-nerds is some kind of hyperlinked index of the site IDs used by Spirit & Opportunity. This would let users jump into the story at the relevant point. You probably wouldn't need to have discrete descriptions of each site ID, maybe group a bunch of realated ones together.

Does such a table or index of what site id is where already exist on the web? Google failed me - or at least I failed it with my choice of keywords...

[odave]

What would also be nifty for us MER-nerds is some kind of hyperlinked index of the site IDs used by Spirit & Opportunity.
[...]
Does such a table or index of what site id is where already exist on the web? 

Yes it does, at the MER Analyst's Notebook, up to sol 450 (duh, me)

So I went and compiled the data found in the "Sol Summaries" and "Maps" pages for Spirit ('cause she's my favorite ) into the attached Excel file. Note that I used the alpha designation for site 100+, since it's what we're most used to looking at. I also did not drill down into the position numbers for each site - that would be a good deal more work. Let me know if I made any transcription errors.

This could be a starting point for the hyperlink table I suggested above. If you think it's useful, Emily (or anybody else), I can do one for Oppy as well.

Going beyond Sol 450 will require more grunt work, of course...

 MERSiteSummary.zip ( 6.64K ) Number of downloads: 451