Leaving Victoria crater Options

[Aussie]

A good call by the team. Condition monitoring revealing a high probability of a known failure mode, get the rover to a position where some movement will be possible. High slippage slopes and dunefields are not a good environment and a crater over a kilometer away would seem a touch risky, so maybe they will stick to the annulus. But who knows. The design of these vehicles is a tribute to all those involved and they just keep hanging in there.

[Guest_Oersted_*]

Huh. Do you suppose they'll get another chance to look at rock this deep? They never really imaged any of the wall closely. And now they suddenly have to leave. Most mysterious.

Hardly mysterious, unless you really want to see a conspiracy. The decision making process regarding the rovers has always been extremely open, with all the facts laid bare to the interested public. Much more information than we could demand.

[centsworth_II]

Huh. Do you suppose they'll get another chance to look at rock this deep?

Not bedrock, but they want to get out and look at the cobbles. These may have come from much deeper... or far away. I don't know what the thinking is on their origin.

[TheChemist]

We should not forget that one of the great benefits of the rovers being so long-lived, is that the scientists can do "target research".
It is quite possible that full analysis of data obtained "in a hurry" while traveling south to reach Victoria has lead to important clues that call for
a second more detailed look (i.e. the cobbles in this case). If the scientists judge that the benefits of examining the cape's walls are less
prominent than their new science target, it is not a surprise that they choose to get out and pursue that target instead.

PS. Not to mention the "born to be wild" feeling of roving in the plains, too

[mike]

I'll have to go to Mars myself..

[fredk]

I have searched long for visually distinctive strata, and seen nothing striking.

From the latest update:

"Just this past month, we finally found the bottom of that dune unit at Cape Verde and we did that from high-res and super-res imagery," Hayes said. "We've seen the base of the unit we're talking about."

And underneath that dune field?

"Another dune field," offered Hayes. "It might be either be a completely different dune field below it or it could be that the dune field we're looking at was part of a very, very large dune field. You can have dunes running on the back of other dunes, so it can either something like a 10-to-30-foot dune riding on back of a 100-foot dune field or it's another dune field from another time."

Anyone offer a guess as to which super-res sequence shows this?

[Guest_Bobby_*]

Does anyone have any overhead views of the area to the North of Victoria that might show this unnamed crater. I have a feeling it's not Erebus
and it's another one.

[Pertinax]

Does anyone have any overhead views of the area to the North of Victoria that might show this unnamed crater. I have a feeling it's not Erebus
and it's another one.

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/tm-.../MERB_766_1.jpg

FWIW, I don't see how it could be anything but Erebus.



-- Pertinax

[djellison]

That's the wierd thing - Erebus (and Terra Nova, adjacent and overlapping) are both names - but are the only large craters to the NNW.

If, perhaps, they meant to say WNW, then there's a large eroded crater at that sort of range.

Doug

[algorimancer]

Erebus. A bit boring, not the target I'd have chosen (Ithaca!), but at least the scenery will be changing. In many ways I prefer the journey to the destination.

[mhoward]

It's been awhile since I've looked at the satellite images, but from what I remember (dunes, drifts, sand) I have a hard time understanding how they could go W-NW, even with perfect mobility. Cobbles are great, but sure would love to see some new terrain. Who knows, if they covered some new ground, maybe they might find some interesting cobbles.

[PaulM]

Anyone offer a guess as to which super-res sequence shows this?

Is this the super-res image of the lower dune field that interested Hayes and Lauren Edgar so much?:

http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/p...B0P2534R2M1.JPG

This image is part of a large set of apparently identical sub-frame images and so I assume that it is a super-res image. I would really appreciate it if someone was to process this image and other images of Capo Verde to bring out the details that interest MER geologists so much. The panorama which I have seen which seems to best show details of sedimentary structures is the following pan by ant103:

http://www.db-prods.net/blog/wp-content/up...2-quickview.jpg

I think that this pan shows a sequence of cross bedded strata formed by winds blowing from South to North, followed by horizontally bedded strata, followed by cross bedded strata formed by winds blowing from North to South.

I realise that what I call horizontally bedded strata is actually tillted at about 10 degrees to the South. However what I am assuming is that the whole of the Capo Verde cliff has been tilted 10 degrees to the South by subsidence of the wall of Victoria crater.

[PaulM]

It's been awhile since I've looked at the satellite images, but from what I remember (dunes, drifts, sand) I have a hard time understanding how they could go W-NW, even with perfect mobility. Cobbles are great, but sure would love to see some new terrain. Who knows, if they covered some new ground, maybe they might find some interesting cobbles.

On many occasions SS has expressed an interest in looking at cobbles on the plains after Oppy is finished with Victoria. I guess that his reason is that there is not much variety in the rocks of Meridiani and so the opportunity for Oppy to look at more meteorites and at rocks from elsewhere on Mars (such as "Bounce") is attractive.

I think that Oppy's first scientific target after it has left Victoria on its road to Erebus or a similar crater may be an exotic cobble close to Beagle crater described in the following Opportunity Update:

"Sol 875: ... Opportunity used its panoramic camera and miniature thermal emission spectrometer on a distant potential meteorite; ..."

There are nice color and false color photos of this rock in the following post:

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...ost&p=61844

The following map shows the general area that Oppy was in in SOL 875:

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...ost&id=7283

An advantage of Opportunity attempting to drive in the general direction of Erebus crater is that most of the journey could be accomplished without crossing ridge crests. Opportunity only got stuck in Purgatory because it attempted to cross a ridge crest.

Once Opportunity has passed Erebus crater then this will open up the possibility of Opportunity driving many many km across the very easy driving country it encountered at the start of its mission. Anyone who does not believe that Opportunity can drive at least another 12 km should read the following quote from the latest Planetary Society MER update:

These rovers are about 100 years in rover years, but who knows," Soderblom mused, "maybe they'll live to 200. The fact that they're still making such significant discoveries deep into their missions sort of says – don't give up on these missions when they're halfway through," he said. We need to keep the funding there to let them get all the fruits they can."

[nprev]

I'd like to see a focus on the cobbles as well. They're interesting, and probably have a variety of origins (mostly actual meteorites or ejecta from impacts, I'd suspect.) Either way, they seem to offer a way to examine materials from places beyond Oppy's physical capability to reach

[Shaka]

Like these, for example: Rock Pile
As we rolled by them, I thought it a shame that we didn't have time to poke around in there.
Maybe we'll get another chance on the way back up north.