I told you they don't do regular updates anymore and your answer was : look at Tesheiner's route map.
So, you know where's the answer (ah ah ah)

Yeah but between the lines one could see it's an estimation request. I would say we're 8 - 10 meters in...

Got you now! You want estimation and Tesheiner's map is too much precise
Sorry, I could not resist

Bravo, EGD.

Enough of the X-Files. We now return to your regularly-scheduled rational discussion.

You've been away for a while....

As I said to Philip on a personal message, I was about to ask if somebody has got a anaglyph map of Victoria (I can't actualy remember)
the same type Cosmicrocker posted for Spirit at Home Plate. Using this + Fredk's angles measurements, I thing we'll have a prety good estimation of how deep and how far Oppy has travelled since the ridge.
Does it make sense ?

Climber: I'm not sure how it will help, but I am happy to make a HiRise anaglyph of Duck's Bay for you, and overlay Eduardo's route. The Victoria contour map that was used for a short time as the JPL-posted route map might be more helpful. It shows that Opportunity is approximately 4 vertical meters below the rim.
Click to view attachment

Here you have a table with rover coordinates (in meters) for each driving sol since 1291. You can use the (x, y)s to calculate the net driving distance into the crater and the (z) to estimate how deep the rover is in relation to the rim.
Two comments, part of the business of handling the rover's mobility data:
- The coordinates on the table are actually (y), (x), and (-z), but if you want to calculate distances it doesn't matter.
- The "reset to zero" on sol 1305 is something that happens when a "new site" is declared. No real move, actually.

1291 -28.0212::-6.51046::0.507077
1293 -25.24::-1.34209::2.05349
1298 -23.2091::2.2861::3.08661
1302 -24.4837::2.98882::3.35583
1305 -26.5627::3.65416::3.54373
1305 0::0::0
1321 0.980456::-0.563328::-0.181285
1327 2.54863::-1.26523::-0.429307
1329 0.740809::1.42287::0.484411

Thanks Tom,
I'm not sure I'm the only one to appreciate the anaglyph.

Nice!
Enjoy
Astro0
Click to view attachment

What is that?!?

Oh my gosh!

Sorry... taken aback by that image. Just my first reaction...

Sun setting/rising over the rim of Victoria crater.

Doug

It looks like Opportunity is finishing up this big "Lyell mosaic"; I've counted 61 pointings in L257R1 filters since sol 1333.
James, Alan, Jvandriel, others? Are you planning to stitch it?

As soon as it's down and I have the time I expect I will, should be spectacular.

Aaagh! too much to do

J

I know. I was just expressing my awe. Doesn't translate well into text, I guess.

Oppy has now been on Mars for 2 Martian years!

And I realize it's the wrong unit of measure, but Opportunity has been at Victoria Crater for more than one Earth year!

Remember when it seemed like the drive south from Endurance would take forever, that we would never get to Victoria? And now we have been here for nearly 1/3 of Opportunity's time on Mars.

That gives some elbow room to Ithaca...

This it what autostitch produced from what is down so far
Click to view attachment

Looks like Otto Stitch spent too much time at Oktoberfest.

I wonder if future cleaning events will ever restore the Pancam lenses to their original clarity.

We can only hope so, EGD.

There have been several interesting investigations going on recently. Did you notice multiple images of the same parts of the outcrop under varying lighting angles? More recently, multiple L6 subframes of Cape Verde have been appearing. I guess they are doing a super-res panorama in subframes to avoid using some of the dustier parts of the lenses.

Be kind to me, because I'm treading new ground here. After devoting yesterday evening to capturing several dozen digital images of comet Holmes/17P, and much of today trying to stack those images into something worthy of posting in the "comet outburst" thread, it was a dismal failure. I blame it on the camera. At least I learned a few things about using Registax.

The dozens of pancam subframes of Cape Verde encouraged me to abandon the faint comet images and play with the Cape Verde images. I'm sure a better superres panorama could be assembled, but here is my first attempt.
Click to view attachment

Thanks for the image. It is strange how the lower grooves are placed. It almost looks like the represent wind erosion lines more than layers.

I thought so too, but if you look at that jumbled ejecta layer overlaying the grooved rock, you'll see several fragments with striations at a variety of angles. This suggests to me that the direction of the grooves is not determined by the wind, though wind erosion may have made them visible.

CE

CosmicRocker - That may not quite be of publication quality, but it certainly shows the bedding features well - better than any Cape Verde image I've seen to date. Congratulations. To me, all of those beautiful low angle cross-beds look infinitely more like "whoosh!" (surge beds deposited in a great hurry, in other words) than they do like anything deposited in a more leisurely (and planar) fashion by wind (planar cross-bedding in dunes) or water, but some here have accused me of having my own strange ideas about the relative importance of impact cratering on Mars.

As for the mysterious "grooves" that cut across bedding and rise towards the upper right, I have no ready geological explanation. The fact that they clearly cut across bedding tells you that they are a younger feature, superimposed on the original rock. They might thus represent aqueous alteration along a near-horizontal fracture, later emphasized by the wind because they made the local rock slightly more resistant to erosion on either side, but in principle you should then see the fracture. Alternatively, they might represent some short of planar shock feature caused by the impact that created Victoria, one that likewise made the rock locally more resistant to erosion - but I know of no terrestrial analogs. Indeed, they might represent something else altogether.

-- HDP Don

Hi all !

long time no see ... I havn't had much time in the last months for following the forum very closely.
It's great to see so many of you still continue the contributions of imaging works ...

From time to time I'm stopping by to take a quick look at new raw images.
One of the latest Navcam images of inside Victoria caught my attention, so I tried a colorization
(together with a little geometric distortion) to continue the "Alien Landscapes" series



and, as a flashback to Sol 408, another sequel to the "Roving Mars" color hazcam series:



Of course the usual color disclaimer applies (artificial colorization as "artist's impression", not intended to represent "true colors"
as might be seen in reality

Nirgal

This is exquisite. You really should enter it in a landscape photography competition.
But maybe that's illegal because you weren't holding the camera?
Send it to Aviation Week and Space Technology for their annual photography issue!

Welcome back.

Nirgal,
Your two pictures give me a kind of "relaxing" feeling; a little bit as when I watch the stars on a very pure nigth.
Pure art beauty.
Can't stop looking.
Thanks

Nirgal, that Victoria image is just... WOW!

Nirgal: Allow me to get in line with the rest of your fan club to say that we have missed your beautiful images. It is nice to see your latest. Is there a web site where we might find a gallery of your past work?

Dr. Burt: Thanks for your kind comments. I've never done one of those stacked images before, so I am sure it can be improved upon. That diagonal groove is certainly curious. I hope they can manage to get closer to it for some better images, but it does look secondary to me.

I can see a "whoosh" in the visible sedimentary structures here, but I can also see the migration of standard, run-of-the-mill, aeolian bedforms. It is not obvious to me that the two processes would create recognizably different structures on the scales we see in a typical MER panorama. One probably will need to map the lateral changes across multiple capes and bays to build a good story. It certainly has been nice to drive into this crater's layers for a closer look.

Thank you all very much for the nice words about the images ... glad you like it



Unfortunately, I still havn't found the time to set up a "real" web page yet (spent all my spare time working on the
images and software themselves, so there is not much time left for the presentation part
Also I had to remove many of the older images
that could be found on the forum because of space limitations of my web povider.
... But the long term goal of a dedicated web gallery or maybe even publishing in form of a book still remains

Nirgal

P.S.: here are some links to other recent images posted previously on the Orbiters board:

Tribute-to-MGS





(Full resolution image: 3 Megabytes)

Dam'! If I only had the money, I'd retire there.

sol 1342 L26:



Thought some might be interested in a color version of the superres pan.


And here is a "work in progress" sol 1337 L257 pan looking down at "Smith" ( I think):




I have just about given up on Oppy panoramas. Does anyone know what happened to the "plan" to release the "RAW" JPGs with a dust correction?

Given that we know how hard the Oppy stuff is to work with - stunning work on that pan Hort!!

I'm not sure if/when they'll get the resources in place to better flat-field the images, it's really hard to do.

Images here
http://pancam.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_ins...true_color.html

and here
http://pancam.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_ins...alse_color.html

may fare slightly better than the default JPG's from JPL/Exp.

Doug

The pancam images of Verde from sols 1329 (before drive) and 1342 form a long baseline pair. Here's an anaglyph from the R1's. As usual, differences in lighting make it a bit hard to view. Still, those interested in the diagonal slash might like to get the 3D view:
Click to view attachment

super 3D panorama L257 1x4 (sol 1329) - L26 1x4 ( 1342) of Cabo Verde:

Spectacular, Horton!

The RAT's still working
Click to view attachment
I love showing these gifs when talking with kids. They're a nice compliment to the Dan Maas MER/IDD animation.
Astro0

There is no way on God's Red Mars that I could resist driving Oppy over to Cabo Verde and have her spend a few months working over that rock face.

It looks like there is sun for much of the day along this side of the promontory, and that there are approaches where Oppy would only be riding along at a 20 degree slope or so. I'd bet Oppy could safely work the rock face.

Anyone wanna speculate?



-the other Doug

I would happily drive closer - but I wouldn't dare get within an IDD's reach. I wouldn't get closer to the base of the cliff than the height of the cliff ( a 45 degree local horizon ) - because that's when the power and comms start to get impacted.

Doug

Horton.
Thank you. The x-eyed views are much appreciated. Is it my imagination or is slumping and a rockfall a reasonable explanation for the diagonal feature and its abrupt termination.

We've heard from the top that this is not on, but it sure is fun to imagine this, and who knows, perhaps if an interesting enough target was spotted they'd rethink their decision?

As far as Verde goes, from the orbital view the surface looks sandy between us and the lower cliff, so it might actually be hard to drive across to the lowest, tastiest looking faces.

I'm sure other cliffs would be easier to access, and as we discussed before you'd want ideally a north facing cliff during the southern winter and so on. I don't know whether the reduced ability to communicate near a cliff face would be critical. As far as falling rock I imagine the background rate is extremely low, but I'd be more worried about pulling the rat out.

Do we know how 'deep' Victoria Crater is towards the middle (I know the sandy dunes in the uplifted middle lay a bit higher)?

Great pic, Horton. Now, what has happened to our lizard? Did the dust storm drive it away?

Brian

It looks to me that, from the standpoint of winter sun position, Cabo Frio would be a better destination over the medium term, or, even better, the unnamed cape three south from Frio. These offer a northerly slope and avoidance of cape shadows over most of the day. This assumes, of course, that we are capable of crossing the sandy barriers that lie between us and those capes. If not then we probably have to climb back up out of Duck Bay, and circle around on top to the southerly capes.

Driving to cliff faces is fun to think about, but more realistically I'm wondering what will come after we're done studying the three layers we're parked at now. I seem to recall discussions about driving in deeper, depending on what the surface looked like from up close. Well new pancams show the surface downslope, but I don't know how drivable it is. There's clearly some exposed rock, but also sand and very small ripples.

Another factor might be solar illumination as we head towards southern fall (one month away) and winter. It will be better to be tilted north, so one of the bays on the south rim of Victoria would be ideal. Possibilities are Bays L1, K1, N1, and the south ends of O1 and I1, all of which have slopes roughly comparable to Duck Bay.

Good lighting has banished it back into the shadowy world from which jpeg artifacts and poor illumination had allowed it to momentarily emerge.

That sand looks deep. Have the rovers made it through anything that deep before?

The MER have crossed a lot of sand, most of significant, though undetermined, depth, and only gotten bogged down a few times. I would suppose that the chance of getting bogged is determined more by how the MER drive, than by the sand depth. I suspect we have to worry more about the composition of the sand - it's fineness and 'fluffiness', than about its depth. The main depth issue probably comes in when we are trying to climb uphill out of the crater. If the sand is enough to cause the wheel cleats to lose contact with the rock - whether a centimeter or a meter deep - we may be in trouble.
On a flat run there may be no trouble. We should, however, take a close look at the sandy patches before we cross.

Now, 3 weeks later we have such an IDD analysis - at exposure "Smith"- as beautifully assembled for our enjoyment by Horton HH :Smith Closeup
We don't have any spectrometry results yet, but the MIs do seem to indicate that there are no visible concretions in the "Bright Band" (my unit C). Perhaps the absence of blueberries explains why the band is bright, but this fact should explain its erosion peculiarities as well. I believe I can still see some mini-vugs in Smith, so there remains that link with the upper units.
Is anyone prepared to offer a hypothesis regarding the origin of the bright ring yet?

The firmness of the sand seems to be more related to some kind of cemented sand after eons years. Hence, it is not a wind-deposited sand. I think that the sand from the slope must be somewhat loose since its origin is of wind sand deposited. The other factor is about the slope of the firm land which sand covers. Let suppose that these loose sand is of little depth, lets say, about less than 3 centimeters (cm)s, I think that the MER would be able grasp the firm floor after slipping some revolutions. It would be possible when the slope is smooth, less than 10 degrees. The slope below the duck bay is greater than 24 degree close to the rims but the slope will lower at lower altitudes of crater. Now I am imaging that the height of Victoria crater is of about 70 meters which is considered very tall. Spirit took many months to climb with much effort on the lower parts but it exceeded easier on the taller parts when the surface was more firm. The Columbia hill has about 110 meters from the bottom of the hill. Imagine it.

Hence, I feel that if Oppy goes down to the bottom of Victoria Crater, it will not be able to get out of Victoria crater anymore since the it will face slope greater than 20 degree until reaching the firm surface (stones) where Oppy is sitting on these moments.