Distant vistas, Endeavour, Iazu, and beyond Options

[fredk]

To answer Ustrax's querries from the other thread, I think we can now see more of the south west rim of Endeavour and Iazu. In this image I've lined up the views from 1987 pancam (colour on bottom, from Astro in this post) and 2136 navcam (top, from Ant's navcam mosiac):

The leftmost (Endeavour north rim) and middle (far rim) features look similar. But it looks like we can see more stuff on the right, which is Endeavour south rim and Iazu. The view we had a few sols ago (2133) of Iazu was still partly obscured by dunes, so it makes sense that we can see more now.

I can't see Bopolu in the navcams, though it could be there and buried in the jpeg noise...

[pgrindrod]

I've been meaning to post this for a while now, and the recent chat has spurred me on.

I've had a go at predicting what Opportunity can possibly see, both now and further along the predicted route. I took the HRSC topo for the area, overlaid a CTX image, plonked down a marker for (roughly) where I thought Oppy was at the time (about a week ago now), and then let ArcMap figure out what's visible for something 1.8 m off the ground at that point. I then tried again for a different point along the predicted path.

So here's the base map for the area. The green dot is my poor attempt at a location.


This is what might be visible at the moment (green is visible, red, er, isn't)


And this is what might be visible in the future (from the red dot)


This method is very sensitive to both the underlying DEM and the exact location you view from. I can get very different results by moving the marker just a tiny distance. So take it with a pinch of salt, and then add a bucket or so extra for good measure. It'd obviously be loads better if I could stick a HiRISE DEM underneath, as this method worked pretty well for the Pathfinder DEM.

I'm actually hoping that the view heading down the gentle slope will be a lot better than this predicts.

Pete

[fredk]

I've had a go at predicting what Opportunity can possibly see

This is really cool, Pete. I've got a couple of questions/comments. First, does this take into account the curvature of the surface?

Your results definitely look sensible along the inside of the far rim of Endeavour, presumably since the slope is quite large there. But in both plots, there are areas right adjacent to the observation point that aren't green. Why is that? I can see that the blotchiness of the green areas on the flatter areas makes sense, since the slopes there are extremely small. But it should still be green close to the observation point.

I see what you mean by the green areas changing quite a bit when you move the observation point around - again, since the terrain is so flat. I wonder if you could do a series of these plots, each time moving the obs. point around a bit (say within a 10 metre or even 100 metre region), and then take the union of all the green areas. That may eliminate the high frequency noise.