Okay gang... it looks like our brave gal will be heading into Victoria at some point - once she's proven that the dark streaks are caused by dark dust belching out of the crater! - but things are a little quiet for now so here's a question for all to ponder...

As Oppy heads into Victoria, what's the ONE thing you really, really want to see in there? Something purely scientific, like a specific geological feature..? Something aesthetic, like a sunset seen from within the crater, or the rover's shadow on the dunes?

What's the one pancam or navcam image you have in your mind that you want to find when you go online, that will make you lean towards the screen and go "Oh my...."?

FHAZ sequence, one frame every hour - for 12 hours

Doug

I'd like to see some strata with fine, horizontal bedding planes, like some of the better shale exposures on Earth. Don't think it'll happen, but a guy can dream...

Sunrise on the western cliffs... as seen from below. Purely for aesthetics.

If I could be willfully extravagant (ie insane) with resources and stealing from both Doug and Michael:

1 fixed Pancam view (the Western cliffs would be perfect) taken in three filters\ lossless compression every few minutes from slightly before dawn to dusk, preferably often enough so that you can make a movie sequence that condenses an entire day into 10-15 seconds at 15+ fps.

That's 585Megabytes for the days shooting (at least) and there are other parameter constraints (power, the time it takes to point and take the shots) that almost certainly mean that this simply cannot be done.

A slightly less extravagant approach as detailed below would allow us to make a 15 second clip that would look gorgeous on those 1080p HD TV's that are doing the rounds.

2x1 Pancam three filter shot (2048x1024 is close match to the 1920x1080 of 1080p). 1 sequence per hour from 1 hour pefore dawn (5AM) to about 9:AM then 1 every 2 hours from then until the 3:00PM local and back to 1 per hour to capture the light\tone changes for sunset. 12 pans in total costing you 75Megabytes with ~8bpp for lossless or nearly lossless compression.
The second part of the sequence are Navcam's taken at a rate of 1 every 4 minutes (15 per hour) for the entire day to get lighting levels for every 1 degree change in sun position across the scene. You can probably afford to bring these back fairly highly compressed - say 2bpp - without seriously degrading the final product. Final cost of these would be ~55Megabytes.
With (quite) a bit of work you could build a very dramatic and smooth (15fps) 14 second full HD resolution clip "1 Day in Victoria".

Yeah I know - completely flagrant waste of a good rover. I'd love it though and it would make for a great title scene for the 2nd MER iMAX movie.

55 megaBYTES.



That's about 4 days of downlink. An average pass is 50-100 MegaBITS

10 runs of a 2 pointing L456 mosaic at 12:1 would be 40 Mbits (5 Megabytes) - that's not too bad. It would be a sequence of complete imaging excess and glutony...I love it

DOug

Like J.J., I'm interested in seeing the layers with all the analytic measurements Oppy can muster, as it slowly descends along side a cliff, as far down as it can safely go. I would like to know as much about the geologic history of this area of Mars as I can.

If travel is possible from there. I'd like to get a closer look at the curtains of dark material below Tierra del Fuego.

How about the final image of Victoria fading over the horizon as Oppy heads east towards Big Crater?

A fossil.

Yes, a fossil would be nice; but I'm thinking of two other different things that are much more likely than that, yet still unlikely in of themselves.

1) a sequence of photos of a rock fall within Victoria (it's possible because of the software set up to identify movement of the dust devils--just unlikely because of the rarity of such an event).

2) evidence that would confirm recent water activity somewhere within Victoria (it's possible because of the pipes along the NE side of the crater). Perhaps a close up image of one of those pipes.

Didn't they already see that..?

Click to view attachment

Very Funny!!! But take a look at this. This is real...although I'm using a little imagination.

Click to view attachment

It looks like somebody kicked the bucket!

What is the old saying? "Keep litter in its place!"

Tell you what......, I would NOT like to see a tennisball sized rock on the solar panels.......eek.

A pancam shot looking straight up that isn't just sky...

A man can dream...

A long exposure image taken at night showing the layered bedrock lit by starlight and Phobos/Deimos-light. The image would capture the bedrock and show the night sky crossed by the streaks of one or more of Opportunity's now sadly departed orbital ancestors such as MGS and the Viking orbiters.

Just for sentiments sake.

Evidence of fairly recent laminar flow down the face of exposed sedimentary rocks.

A panorama, showing a rock, the trail it left, and the cliff it fell off of. I suppose it would be asking for too much for there to be an obvious spot for it to have fallen from.

A variation on Edward's theme: A vertical pancam panorama, a strip say 1x6, reaching up from cliff base to cliff top. Though I don't suppose you'd call it a "panorama" in that case.

I'd love a time lapse of a day at Vicky too, but I think I might prefer it from the outside, with Oppy set atop the Beacon. Perhaps a realistic project for a post-mobility (shudder shudder) rover.

I believe the word you were looking for was mosaic...

A vertical panorama? - in TV-speak here in the UK, the vertical version of a pan is a tilt. So I'm coining the word tiltorama! Though if the view was of a distinctive object - and with a nod to nprev - I rather like the idea of a "featurama".

Andy

An example of a tiltorama is attached...Giant Sequoia tree just doesn't fit in one frame.

I've used the free version of autostitch to do vertical pans, but it does REALLY WEIRD things if the images are upright. It's like it's looking for a horizon or something. I flip the frames 90 degrees on their side and it stitches them fine, then I flip the resulting pan vertical.

That's an awfully premature conclusion. A *lot* of things can cause relatively straight-looking linear formations (like the roughly linear formation along the NE rim). Just because someone, somewhere has *hypothesized* that other linear features in entirely different landforms that look something like what we see in Victoria *could* have been caused by water traversing along a joint in the rock doesn't automatically make these features in Victoria "pipes."

That and the *only* thing that has ever been seen and hypothesized as a sign of recent surface water movement are gullies on crater wall slopes, and there isn't even the first hint of such things here at Victoria.

So, the hypothesized ancient "pipes" (if that's what they are) seen elsewhere on Mars are not thought to be associated with recent water activity, and it's only a somewhat wild speculation that the linear features in Victoria have a similar origin to other supposed "pipes." And, of course, the only sign that anyone accepts as even potentially showing signs of recent water activites, gullies, aren't evident at Victoria at all. Anywhere.

Other than that, yeah, you've got a good suggestion there...

-the other Doug

The word "Perhaps" as I used it indicates doubt. This is a wish list, afterall.

Edit: Also, pipes might explain the dark dust, if the deposits on the streaks come from a chemically altered source. Granted, there are plenty of other potentially good explanations; but I don't think we can eliminate this particular possibility yet.

Hey, MII -- I didn't mean to sound negative, there. And, I note, in the first 'graph of your post, you did say that both of the events you described are, indeed, unlikely in and of themselves.

My whole point, here, is to try and drag the reins back a little bit on the horse of unbridled speculation. The "pipes," as they have been called, that have been speculated upon elsewhere on Mars are considered to be extremely ancient remnants of water transportation along joints in rockbeds. The speculation is that these "channels" might have transported water several billion years ago. There is no connection whatsoever between that theory and any theory of any still-liquid underground aquifers on Mars. The gullies that have been observed seem to be explained best by ice deposition on crater walls, direct from the atmosphere, which is then protected and warmed for long enough to exist as liquid water very close to the surface. For a very short period of time.

What I wanted to take strong exception to is a statement like "We want to spend time and energy looking for recent water activity, which is made possible by the discovery of water transport pipes within the crater walls." As I have mentioned, that statement is simply not true -- there are no signs of recent water activity within Victoria, the "pipes" are likely to be nothing more than linear joints in the rockbeds that existed before the Victoria impact, and even if these joints did once transport water, that hasn't happened in a *long* time, probably billions of years.

Fair 'nuff?

-the other Doug

How would be know it when we see it?

I'll bet that the dunes within Victoria are evidence of downward laminar flow. My reasoning is that as wind flows across the Meridiani plain and encounters the ejecta apron of Victoria an airfoil effect will occur, resulting in a vacuum within the crater which will draw air from near the surface of the ejecta apron and downward into the crater.