I really don't know. I believe that the "official" NASA stance is that the trip to Endeavor started at Cape Agulhas, and the last we've seen from the maps is that the trip from there was estimated at 19km. I'm not suggesting that anyone should adopt my practice of counting from Duck Bay, but if you do, just add another 1/2 km.

Perhaps one of the reasons they stopped putting the bar on the maps is that the total distance is a moving target. Every uncrossable dune and "interesting rock" adds to the total, and it's futile to try and calculate the percentage based on a variable number. So I just like to keep an eye on the horizon and watch the scenery go by.

I don't think they've stopped. The bars are included in the maps from Ohio State University - here's the latest one:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/tm-...ty-sol2199.html
What's changed is that we're now also getting very regular map updates (basically every drive) from Tim Parker. The OSU updates were never nearly as frequent as Parker's.

What I did myself: I used what I thought was the day we left Victoria = on Oct 18th 2008, Sol 1683, at 12678m (and I can't remember now how I "choose" this date) ... and followed this way. I mean, we could discuss departure date but there is no point doing so.
My post was to put Oppy's traverse as a distance perpective to compared to Spirit's.

Of course. Arguing departure date doesn't get us any closer to Endeavour. The point of your post was well taken, but sometimes I can't help being pedantic. This is a "statistics" thread, after all!

fredk: Thanks for the clarification on the maps. I knew that Tim Parker was driving the recent frequency of map updates, but never understood that the other maps were generated outside of JPL (despite the legend), or that we could still expect to see them from time to time.

Agree too!... so, I guess this is THE source... : http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/sta...08.html#sol1681

Now that Opportunity has surpassed Viking 1 in mission duration (longest surface mission) I tried to find some orbital spacecraft for new milestones.


Mission, Orbital Insertion-Mission Ended, Duration, Date Spirit Should Surpass

Galileo, 12/07/1995-09/21/2003, 2846 days, 10/19/2011
MGS, 09/11/1997-11/05/2006, 3343 days, 02/27/2013
PV*, 12/04/1978-10/08/1992, 5058 days, 11/08/2017

*Pioneer Venus


Mars Odyssey and both Voyagers entered operation before MER and hopefully won't be ending for a long, long time.
(All figures are hopefully within a day or two. Feel free to correct me.)


Edit: BTW, Odyssey should be surpassing MGS in "at Mars duration" on December 18th.

Edit Edit: Corrected for VP end of mission date. (Thank you Paolo.)

PV was lost on 8 October 1992 and was still transmitting when it "aerobraked"

Time for an update...

The upturn in energy for Opportunity is the result of minor panel cleaning events rather than coming out of the winter solstice.

hi Dilo!

Is it possible to post the raw data of your diagrams?
Just to play with it and make some stupid statistics on my own.

thanks,
Moreinput

Sure, this is my updated file in .xls format (original is .ods, but I think is limited in compatibility)- I removed plots-

My monthly update:
Click to view attachment
Great energy increase in the 2nd half of June!

Here is a graph showing the weekly values of Opportunity's Watt Hours, Tau, and Dust Factor (as stated in the weekly Opportunity Updates on the main Mars Rover website) from January 2010 to July 15, 2010.

Click to view attachment

Low tau's are good -- high dust factors are good.
A tau of 4.7 is a 99% blocked atmosphere - we are in a very clear sky period ( t=0.2)
I am assuming a dust factor of 1.0 is how Oppy left the clean-room.

Notice when Tau goes up (sol 2253) and the Dust Factor goes down, the power goes down. And when tau is very low (sol 2300) and the dust has been cleaned off (0.7) the power zooms (for what is available in winter!). The winter solstice was Sol 2260 ( i think?)

For a review of Tau, I refer you to Emily's awesome recap of the (click) 2007 Dust Storm
I haven't found a good description of the dust factor yet(!)

Cheers

Cool plot, thanks PDP8E!

I've been hoping someone would do that! Thanks PDP. That shows nicely how we've climbed out of the 50% dust factor level we'd been mired in for so long.

One little request: would you consider showing the individual data points the next time you do a plot?

There's not much to it - it's just the percentage of light that gets through the dust coating the panels. It drops as dust settles onto the arrays (usually slowly), and rises as wind gusts clean the arrays off (can be very suddenly).

Thanks Dilo and FredK

I was wondering if Tau was zero and the dust factor was 100% what are the Whrs differences between Winter solstice and Summer solstice. A nice sine function between those points should give you the maximum possible Whrs on any given Martian day (depending on latitude)

That's an interesting question. Presumably it wouldn't be precisely a sinusoid, even if the solar arrays were level. In addition to the varying incidence angle, the total hours that the Sun is up vary with time of year. And the incidence angles in morning and late afternoon are low even when the Sun climbs high at local summer. I'm sure someone has done an accurate calculation...

Some of Helvick's early posts in the old Whrs thread have a max power curve - for example here

Remember the days when we thought 400Whrs was needed to do anything, and rover death was at 290?

For baseball nuts who love stats: Considering the 70m restraint vs. now driving three sols in a row, I wonder what distance record Oppy might set for some period of time like 3 or 5 or 10 or 100 sols.

I need to slightly anticipate my monthly update because I could have some connection trouble in the next month due to home transfer...

I love that jump in Oppy's power! There's nothing like seeing it in graphical form. Thanks Dilo.

We'll have confirmation in next week update but we already can say that total odometry Spirit + Oppy reached 30km last night. and still

Hello again!

Usually we are looking for the cool new maps of Tesheiner to follow the journey of the rovers.
But the journey is also a journey through the time. Attached you find the journey through the times since 2003. I made also made a version for the german Wikipedia. Maybe someone find it interesting when we reached which scientific target. If you see some errors in it, please inform me about it.

Best regards,
MoreInput

Neat! One suggestion & a question:

1. "Last message from Spirit" might be better phrased as "Communications hiatus". I'm sure that we haven't heard the last from her yet.

2. Are the winter periods true calendar-derived Martian winters, or just the periods of reduced MER activity due to the season? They seem kind of short to me on the graphic.

Anyhow, very cool- thanks!

Hi Nprev!

1. I changed the "Last message from Spirit". We just hope the best.

2. I just took the winter solstice and marked a 3 (earth) month interval. More in the way that that was a time of reduced activity. But the activity is also much influenced through the dust on the solar panels. So I just changed that in the new time line. Interesting: Spirit and Opportunity just landed at the end of summer on mars. I didn't realized that yet.


2. Are the winter periods true calendar-derived Martian winters, or just the periods of reduced MER activity due to the season? They seem kind of short to me on the graphic.

I also changed the date of depature from Victoria to the 17th October (Sol 1683)

This is a really cool way of looking at the mission timeline, MoreInput.

It might have been late summer, but it still left plenty of time for the 90-sol missions to run.

I have a great love of different ways of seeing data, and have to thank you for this method.

Andy

I like it very much too. Thanks
It's seams incredible to "see" how short the primary mission was.

I'd suggest "Launch" instead of "Start." It's obvious in context, but when I first looked at the timeline I had a brief moment of confusion.

LOVE that, great for a quick-look reminder of major mission milestones.

Assuming Oppy started the traverse from Victoria to Endeavour at an odometry of 12678m (which I believe is right), she is now short of only 30m for having roved 10 kms since she left.

Time to update:

Thanks Dilo.

Anyone else spend a few seconds on the upper-right graph, psychically urging Spirit's power levels to chase Opportunity's glorious upwards track?

Andy

Yeah, it's like a game of cat and tau's!

CAT as in Clean Array via Twister?

I thought that a stats post for those of you who love to see the rovers rove might go down well!

It struck me recently when Oppy passed the 23km mark on sol 2355 that she is rapidly heading up towards an average of 10m/sol. This got me thinking when was the last time (if ever) that this was the case.

By my reckoning (and please correct me if I'm wrong) the last time Oppy averaged 10m/sol was all the way back on sol 642 (Nov 13th, 2005) when she finished with 6,424 metres on the clock while she was looking at Antistasi.

Spirit last achieved this feat on sol 416 (Mar 5th, 2005) with 4,161 metres. At this point I believe she was on the top of the Columbia hills (Larry's Lookout) studying a site named Watchtower.

When you consider that even the NASA level 1 target (600m in 90 sols) did not require this workload, when you consider that Oppy is so far "out of warranty" she is now nearly five years older than when she could last claim this average, when you consider all the 1001 other amazing scientific tests she has carried out on top of this driving marathon... well, it makes you think doesn't it?!

Neil

To add to your statements Neil, here are some more informations:

Higher Spirit mean per sol was on Sol 157 June, 12th 2004 roving 21.5m/Sol
Spirit best week ended on Sol 126 May, 7th 2004 roving 86.3m/Sol

Higher Oppy mean per sol was on Sol 438 April, 16th 2005 roving 11.9m/Sol
Oppy best week ended on Sol 415 March, 24th 2005 roving 118m/Sol

On September 14th Oppy mean per sol is 9.8m/Sol (going up) for the whole mission while it's 3.2m/Sol for Spirit (yes, going down)
Now, here is the complete .xls file I use if you want to play around with ...and even fill the gaps I'm too lazy to fill about the begining of the mission.

Click to view attachment

Update.
Encouraging trend of daily odometry and energy budget...

Climber - firstly, thank you for the chance to download the file with all the data on. Very kind of you.

Secondly, purely looking by eye at Teshiner's excellent route map we must be very, very close to the magical 10m/sol after sol 2381?

Neil

Sol 2400 is coming up. Looks to me like the distance travelled from 2300 to 2400 will be greater than for any other 100 sol period, even sol 400 to 500!

Admin - I hope this is ok on this thread. If not please move as you see fit.

As far as the above point goes I think that is right (Climber, Dilo please feel free to correct me)!

At a rough estimate, sol 400 to 500 saw 2,000m travelled.

Sol 2300 to 2395 appears to have covered 2,500m approximately.

Neil

sol 437 odometry: 5225m

sol 339 odometry: 2076m (rounded)

total from sol 339 to sol 437: 3149m

3149 m - about the same distance that was driven on 18 February 1973 by Lunokhod 2! Of course a totally different situation, but it really points out the contrast between driving on the Moon and Mars.

Phil

update... impressive odometry increase in last days!

New milestones shortly.
Tomorrow, Spirit will be on Mars since 2500 (Earth) days. So, on Nov 17th both Rovers will reach the 5000 days mark sitting on Mars. I know days means nothing for the Rovers, but it sure means something for us. Also on December 3rd, the difference between days and sols since Spirit landing will reach 100.000 minutes.
The 5000 Sols mark will be reached the day after Oppy will celebrate her 7th years since landing, January 26th 2011.
Another one: as of Nov 2nd 2010, Oppy mean meters per sol is 10.3 (as shown on Dilo's graph above) and increasing very "fast" since she reached 10m by early October.

Tesheiner's Sol 2410 updated map shows a nice left turn. It's fun to be able to see a direction change during a drive sol -- Oppy's covering a lot of ground!

After Climber's observations on odometry speed increase, I decided to amplify the scale of such parameter, in order to better see it. Moreover, I decided to change plots formats in order to make them more readable, using the 2-weeks average system also for pics/day calculations; lines smoothing is also introduced. In all 3 plots, finally, you'll see only Oppotunity data and now the common timeframe is slightly above 1 martian year, in order to appreciate "seasonal" changes:

One milestone that I think may have been missed occured on Oct 27th when Oppy drove (sol 2403).

This drive saw the combined odometry for Spirit and Oppy go over 20 miles.

I'll just say that again. 20 MILES!

Amazing. Awesome. Inspiring.

Neil

Monthly update.