[X] My Assistant

[akuo]

I decided to add a new topic since we are all following it closely and something is bound to happen soon. Jim Erickson said that earliest Oppy would be making her move would be on Friday, but Steve's update might be read that it isn't happening so soon. I doubt they will be doing anything during the weekend, so Monday maybe?

Anyway the Planetary Photojournal (http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/snt) has some images from sandbox testing at JPL.

[Guest_Edward Schmitz_*]

I agree. I didn't remember them ever doing such a long blind drive, so I looked back over the mission updates. On sol 385 they started doing longer blind drives. They drove 105m on that day. I guess they figured that there wasn't much to run into, even if they couldn't see that far. My question is if they can detect that kind of slippage with inertial guidance, why wouldn't they set it to abort under those conditions? They definitely have a tilt abort. Spirit stopped on that quite a few times. I'm pretty sure they can't detect it. Does anybody have anything difinitive on inertial guidance?

The advantages of the blind drive are speed, lower power consumption, and reduced computer resources. The disadvantage is... pretty obvious. It seems to me that they should rely more heavily on the nav software. They could also start deleting the images from the nav sw as they become obsolete. As it stands now, they only have about three days of auto nav before they fill the flash memory. That's too fast.