Beyond Lewis and Clark Gap, Sol 4482- (September 2, 2016-) Options

[charborob]

Sol 4607 Lnavcam post-drive view:


And a Lpancam view:

[jvandriel]

The Navcam L0 view on Sol 4607-4608.

Jan van Driel

[jvandriel]

and the Pancam L 2 view on Sol 4601-4606.

Jan van Driel

[BuckGalaxy]

Trouble getting up the hill, or just a spot of light excavation work?


[attachment=40613:TrackAnagWeb.jpg]

http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/New_Year_..._rover_999.html

Just before the holidays, the rover encountered some difficult, steep terrain. As the rover tried to advance up 20-degree slopes, the wheels began to dig up the soil and progress slowed to a near stop.

Sensing this, the rover stopped her drive and waited.

So, on Sol 4590 (Dec. 22, 2016), the team had Opportunity back down a short, 2-foot (70-cm) distance to put the rover on a more solid footing.

Before we could continue with rover activities through the holidays, Mars Odyssey went into "safe mode," an event that prevented relay data return from Opportunity. The rover was patient for several sols and in good health.

With Odyssey back, on Sol 4601 (January 2, 2017) Opportunity moved another 6.6 feet (2 meters) to get a good look of the terrain that was disturbed during the up-hill driving challenge.

The disturbed soil reveals brightly colored, unconsolidated material that is of great interest to the science team. So, the plan ahead is to use the rover's robotic arm instruments to investigate this bright soil.

[Explorer1]

Looks like another serendipitious discovery, just like Spirit at Silica Valley.

[jvandriel]

The Navcam L0 view on Sol 4609-4610.

Jan van Driel

[fredk]

We had some images of what is probably Phobos on the evening of sol 4612. Here I've tried to isolate the stars, by registering and averaging the two differences of two similarly exposed frames (with stretches and Gaussian smoothing):

The stars are the short streaks aligned roughly from 2 o'clock to 8 o'clock. (You can see some residual scarring from imperfect subtraction of Phobos.)

Edit: I realized I could get a cleaner subtraction of Phobos by smoothing before subtraction; result replaced.

[Phil Stooke]

It's Deimos (from tweets by Mike Seibert, and the file descriptions on Midnight Planets).

Phil

[fredk]

Thanks, Phil. I'm out of practice with the moons - it should've been obvious. Phobos has marked "retrograde" motion, while Deimos is nearly synchronous, and this bright object is in nearly the same position in each frame (hence the good subtraction).

[serpens]

Regardless of moon identity, it is an impressive effort Fred.

[jvandriel]

The Navcam L0 view on Sol 4611-4612.

Jan van Driel

[jvandriel]

and the navcam T-shirt view on Sol 4614-4616.

Jan van Driel

[Phil Stooke]

Thanks, Jan. It's not easy to get a good result from reprojecting panoramas taken on a steep slope, at least the way I do it, but this is Jan's panorama from sols 4611-4612 in circular form, so you can see the approximate layout of the terrain here.

Phil

[jvandriel]

The Navcam L0 Panoramic view on Sol 4618-4619.

Jan van Driel

[Explorer1]

Almost at the peak!