Spirit cleaner? Options

[elakdawalla]

Whoa! Well spotted!

--Emily

[CosmicRocker]

That's a continuation of the changes initially spotted by fredk last week. The 3 frames over 10 sols animation is nice. There are some other frames that could be forced into the animation, but these three frames provide two roughly equal time steps of 5 sols each...1255-1260-1265 I'm watching it on my PC right now, but these animations drive me to the brink. I can't force the gif below the file size limitation without terribly degrading its quality. I'm sure someone else will manage to post one.

[Astro0]

Had to scale down a bit and clip top and bottom, but the 13 frame file comes in at just under 3mb.
Here's a link to it.
EDIT: Sorry, for some reason the server is running very slow at the moment. Apologies if you are trying to download.

A small two frame reference.
Lots of movement.

Astro0

[Gray]

Thanks Astro0.
It did take a while to download, but it's a very revealing animation. As you said - lot's of movement.

[CosmicRocker]

This simple animated gif is what I was trying to post. I just wanted to keep the time steps roughly equal and the image size maximized. I had to crop it down to the area where most of the movement is taking place. ...1255...1260...1265...

[brellis]

that's the best visualization of the local effect of the storm I've seen. thanks for squishing it thru the portal

[alan]

Horizon comparison 1254-67

[Guest_Oersted_*]

Cosmicrocker, that is just excellent.

So much for those theories about the sand only shifting over millenia on the surface of Mars. I never understood those ideas anyway...

[Tom Tamlyn]

>Horizon comparison 1254-67

Alan,

Thanks for that "Lonely Mountain" diptych. It's one of the most evocative storm images yet.

TTT

[Phil Stooke]

Oersted:
"So much for those theories about the sand only shifting over millenia on the surface of Mars. I never understood those ideas anyway... "

They weren't theories, they were observations. No dune, no drift, nothing but the thinnest surface layer of dust, has ever been observed to move before in this way. This is a unique and very important observation. Thanks, Cosmicrocker.

Phil

[CosmicRocker]

Well, fredk was the guy who was on the lookout at the time, and who first noticed the changes. His earlier comment and animation motivated me to watch for another way to display it.

It is too bad Opportunity was so energy deprived that she couldn't capture similar images. With a little luck, she should be able to give us some before and after views that we can compare.

[Tman]

Hey that's great! Another nice piece of Mars weather behavior.

In what direction has the wind blown here?

[edstrick]

The Viking 1 lander was operating in it's "eternal" extended mission mode and taking very slowly accumulated panoramas (one segment at a time, transmitting in the blind to earth) and "monitoring" images, repeated in a much shorter cycle, of a few specific targets including a few sampler-arm deposited "conical piles" of dirt, dumped in at least one case on top of the end of a largish nearby rock.

Just before the lander died of battery failure and command error, a major, presumably globe-encircling dust storm developed and at least one of the dust piles was nearly blown away by presumably storm associated winds.

Whether the extremely limited data from the lander before it died showed any changes in surface features that were not disturbed by the lander, I don't know, but I don't think any were reported. Worth looking at the limited data again, I'd say.

[antipode]

From the gif, from what azumith is the wind coming?

P

[Tman]

If you look at the area I circled in black in the image below, you can see light splotches that move collectively towards the lower right, which corresponds to roughly towards the south.
[attachment=11231:attachment]

Ah Fred mentioned it already. It looks like we've had here wind from north roughly.