Post Solar Conjunction/Santorini Study Drive, The second leg in our Journey to Endeavor Crater Options

[djellison]

I imagine Scott would be kicking himself if a self-terminated drive resulted in aborted post-drive remote sensing.

[fredk]

There's one nugget in a new Oppy update:

Also of note this week, Opportunity recorded a transit of Mars' moon Phobos across the Sun. The rover used the panoramic camera to capture a series of images of the event.

How did we miss this? The jpeg images are overexposed (something up with the autostretch, I guess), but you can still make out the moon if you look carefully at sol 1750 pancam frames like this one:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...BBP2682R8M1.JPG

[Tesheiner]

IIRC, Horton posted the pictures (an animated GIF) on the other forum some time ago.

[ngunn]

Horton posted the pictures (an animated GIF) on the other forum

So, can we have a link to that?

[Tesheiner]

Found it: http://www.marsroverblog.com/dyn/entry/747...ussion_page/261

[fredk]

Thanks for that reference, Tesheiner. But now I'm really confused: if you look at the sol 1750 pancam jpg images at the jpl site, you can see that they are all overexposed, as I wrote above. No amount of image processing can reveal Phobos directly in those images. Same for the exploratorium images.

But Horton's images aren't overexposed, and show Phobos clearly. ........

[Airbag]

Perhaps he used the much better exposed internal reflection image (for instance, on the upper left in the image referenced above).

Airbag

[stevesliva]

So, can we have a link to that?

Ha. I'd forgotten where it was in the ensuing four years. Look at that! Guess it still exists.

[fredk]

Perhaps he used the much better exposed internal reflection image

Thanks, I hadn't noticed those internal reflections. But that can't be what Horton used, since there are similar reflections in Horton's animation if you look very closely.

[fredk]

To answer my own question, the eclipse images in Horton's animation appear to be thumbnails from the pancam database.

[alan]

Opportunity Rover Sidelined by Charged Particle Hit

The Opportunity rover recently surpassed the five-year mark on Mars. And what did she get as a birthday present? A thorough zapping by a charged particle, perhaps a cosmic ray, which has sidelined the rover for the past several days. "Opportunity stood down for a few sols as a result of a PMA (Panoramic Mast Assembly) error," said Scott Maxwell, one of the rover drivers for the two Mars Exploration Rovers, Opportunity and Spirit. "This turned out to be due to an SEU (Single-Event Upset), as reported by the on-board motor controller." An SEU happens when a charged particle whizzes through a transistor on the rover and flips a bit somewhere inside. "Fortunately, the motor controllers can detect and report these events, so that the rover can safely stop," Maxwell told Universe Today. "We have good reason to hope that Opportunity's PMA is undamaged and that she'll be back on the road shortly."

http://www.universetoday.com/2009/02/05/op...hit/#more-24717

[Tesheiner]

"We have good reason to hope that Opportunity's PMA is undamaged and that she'll be back on the road shortly."

Today is scheduled as driving sol. Expect a short move because there are no "post-drive" images from the site available except for the hazcam pictures.

[mhoward]

Surveyor Crater - sol 1782 108x81 degree rectilinear projection

[BrianL]

Could somebody please turn off the universal cosmic ray generator? It is becoming quite a nuisance.

[Phil Stooke]

OK - done!

Phil