[X] My Assistant

[Bill Harris]

Finally, Spirit's making some progress towards Larry's Leap. It'll be refreshing to see different topography for a change.

One item I'm curious about and I've seen only a few messages here on it. What is the general concensus here about the feature called the "Ultreya Abyss"? The orbital images don't show much: there _is_ a low albedo feature there but I can't say that it is a opening. Early in the mission, I recall that Spirit was to go to Ultreya after contacting the West Spur but those plans changed by the time she got to Columbia Hills. I imagine that the planners wanted something different than the basaltic plain and wanted to examine layered exposures.

--Bill

[Pando]

Hi Ustrax and everybody,

I thought I'd put the Ultreya features seen by MGS and by Spirit side by side for a direct comparison of what we thought we were seeing from MGS images, and what Spirit is actually seeing. Turns out the sand is darker, but not so dark as to make the MGS image as black as it is. Perhaps a shadow of the mountain played also a role?

And yes, looks like the whole inner basin is in clear view.

Cheers!

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[dilo]

I made a stitch of Sol590 NavCam frames toward South and streched them vertically (5x); result is amazing and show lot of features to be studied/explained:

The comparation with my "personal" elevation model (textured with MGS image) show good features correspondances and confirm Pando's hypothesys: the darkest Ultreya patch should be made of dune fields and effect of shadow in the MGS may be important, considering also other similar dark areas not visible in the MER (arrows):