The latest Riding with Robots podcast is featuring an interview with the Rover mission manager Byron Jones. He drops some hints about Opportunities future plans.

Riding with Robots podcasts combine an audio file with a automated slide show. It uses the m4a file format. This podcast requires the QuickTime video player because it downloads an m4a file. Unless you are certain that you can play m4a files - skip it.

Link to a 12 mb m4a file of podcast 16 "Interview with Byron Jones"

http://web.mac.com/bdunford/iWeb/Riding_wi...cast/rwr16c.m4a

Enjoy Jack

Anything new?

He thinks it will be 3 to 6 weeks before Oppy enters Duck Bay.

The mission team have discussed post Victoria targets. Previously visited Erebus crater is high on the "list" of the post Victoria targets.

Jack

Edited for spelling.

Back to Erebus.

Go back to Erebus? You've got to be kidding me.

That made me listen myself and he says there's talk but no decision about that.
They did rush through Erebus without looking too closely at the layering. If
Opportunity is stll going a year from now they may want to try and match the
layers exposed in Erebus with what they see in Victoria.(My thought, the reason
was not commented on in the podcast.)

He also commented on the dark streaks, not mentioning dust clearing at all
but instead concentrating on how the dark streaks looked like material blown
out of Victoria Crater. But with Jim Bell's comments citing dust clearing and
shiny berries, who knows where the truth lies.

To be fair - what else is there to look at post-Victoria? Ithaca is 15k of NASTY dune fields - there's nothing for tens and tens of K's in every other direction. If they do everything that Victoria can give them (and that might take a year or two ) then Erebus, for more study of those amazing festoons - would make sense I guess!

Doug

Time to revive the old crazy Big Crater thread. Someone even put together a prospective route map, as I recall. Sure it's just talk, but if we have that kind of rover mobility remaining after we are "done" with Victoria Crater, I would far rather see them set off to the south-southeast and see how far we get. At least we'd be covering new ground. Obviously it's premature to speculate, but they brought it up

And are we sure it's NASTY dune fields? Nastier than the ones on the way back to Erebus? That's where we could use that MRO coverage.

We're waiting for MRO to image the area so a
more detailed route map can be prepared.

Well - the dunes that we can see E and SE of Victoria are Purgatory-bad.

Doug

That's a no-brainer, then. Don't want to see her perpetually mired in one of those things again...

But now there's improved software and hires MRO images to work with, so that sort of thing is much less of a problem. Given the mobility, heading for Big Crater is the only rational choice once done with Victoria, barring unknown surprises once we get better imaging in that direction.

Remember, on the drive to Victoria they followed the troughs, avoided crossing over the crests of dunes whenever possible. To drive to Big Crater Oppy would have to drive across dunes much of the time instead of following the troughs.

Bingo. If it took 22 months driving along the dunes to cover 6km - it's going to be 40-50-60 months to get anywhere near it - and we KNOW that drive motors fail on these things. Fancy dune-surfing with only 5 wheel drive? You're going nowhere if that happens in the typical Meridiani dune field - especially when you have to cross all the dunes instead of riding between them. The software doesn't let the rover fly - it simply lets it know when it's getting stuck. And it would get stuck....a LOT...and it also makes driving quite slow.

Heading toward Big crater, across very navigation unfriendly terrrain, with the likely outcome being a stuck rover in the middle of absolutely nowhere....that would be quite irrational. Lets see how we do with Victoria ( and we're talking multiple years imho ) - if we still have mobility once we're done with VIctoria ( and it may only be limited mobility by that time ) - then the safe option is to revisit and study more closely the terrain we know to contain good science but didn't have the time to visit previously.

But all this is pure conjectue - personally, I believe our days will end at Victoria - and I don't mid that one bit.

Well, I'm not convinced yet. They might be able to follow troughs south until the chance to strike out east appears. But I won't argue the point, as I'm sure we'll be at Victoria for a long, long time yet.

I agree with Doug, but in a slightly different way. I imagine that after spending a year in victoria, Opp would have hit the high points, but why not "extended missions" to completely, thoroughly examine every square meter of the crater, inside and out? I imagine that a full circumnavigation of the crater, with detailed examinations of every bay, cliff, and rock, would take the rest of the decade.

If, after that Opp is still functioning....I dunno. There's a crater about 60% larger than Victoria to the west, which looks like it has some interesting cliffs. Other than that, there isn't much interesting nearby.
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It does, however, look like the "etched terrain" pavement might possible extend all the way to the Big Crater. At least, in comparing the low-res images to the high res ones I could find. Any pointers to better images?
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