Here's a comparison of textures, all at 100% from the IAS viewer provided on the HiRISE site. It's not at all useful to view the images at lower resolution.

Click to view attachment

The top three show places we know. At Vostok it was still possible to drive diagonally across the drifts. At Purgatory the only possible route was parallel to the crests, or zig-zagging around individual drifts, quite slowly.

Below that are various areas at the same scale as the first row. East of Victoria is a huge band of big drifts. It's not practical to try to drive eastwards through them. At low resolution it looks like the crests are E-W, but they aren't - those are a different scale of massive mounds superimposed on the drifts, like Purgatory itself.

The E-W band of outcrop shown on the low-res map linked to above is actually very bad - huge drifts cover much of it. It is not a highway leading east.

The best plan is to run south through the smaller drifts. HiRISE lets one map them out very easily, and clumps of bigger drifts can be avoided very easily. By the time we get to that mini-Endurance crater the surface is much smoother and from then on it looks easy (within the existing HiRISE coverage).

Phil

Now that Opportunity is going that way, I hope we actually get to see the "darkened" or "scraped" terrain southeast of Mini-Endurance, mentioned here. I'm staking this out as my own "El Dorado", ustrax

Perhaps in about a year?

http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_009141_1780 is probably the best for heading south

Basically - due south it awesome for about 1km
Then it sucks for 2km
Then it's OK for a km
Then it rules turning east.

Doug

I agree with mhoward, that's a great looking area. Oh boy, the fun never ends on this mission.

Phil

Shouldn't it be possible to go through that area of large ripples in "M6" and "M5"? Some outcrops and smaller ripples look comfortable to drive SE. We would have the fast directly East drive on Victoria's annulus and then drive at "M4" already in that smaller ripples.

huumm...promising...somehow it reminded me of Southern Elysium's "frozen sea"...
...And every man has the right and the moral obligation of having an "El Dorado" of his own...

I'm guessing a whole bunch of "Anatolia-like" features. Paolo better get plenty of sleep so as not to nod off as he puts down the lead foot through this region.

Paolo, welcome, good to see you here!

Could you possibly elaborate on the "new driving techniques that will enable up to 100 m. daily drives" that Steve S. mentioned in the radio programme? - Does it involve the autonomous navigation or something completely different? HiRise image integration with MER roving software?

Good luck in the coming endeavour, I wish you six healthy !

Poor Spirit the Forgotten Rover

Before we start heading south of Victoria.
I wish they could stop at the small crater
on the Southern Part of Victoria Crater.
I think that would be an amazing picture.

Then time to rove onto The Yellow Brick Road
to Endeavour

Sweet!

Still one of my favorite features. I hope we get a chance to study more of these in detail.

Oh, you are so wrong! It is a heart attack every time I drive her but I would not miss any drive with her. It will take a few weeks before we spin her wheels and we have some interesting tricks we would like to try.

Paolo

We have several tricks we learned in Duck Bay and while driving Spirit on her way to WH3. The D* planner will allow more intelligent navigation around obstacles and we have also learned to write "intelligent" sequences that react to events that we have found can be recognized by the on-board sensors. As an example, during our treck from Cape Verde to the outcrop in Duck Bay we had some instances where the right side of the vehicle was sinking, therefore slowing down and the rover would stop. The recovery was simple: pull back, turn left, drive forward and then resume the drive. Well, this technique was easy to recognize on board, and the recovery easy enough that we felt confident to let the rover to autonomously do it. I can't recall the sol number, but that technique was actually triggered and recovered the rover from one of these events. It saved us only one sol, but that's the type of tricks we will probably implement.

Also, we are prepared (and so should you ) to have embedding events (not like Purgatory, but more like Jammerbugt). We surely will have some other accidents on our way there. The only sensible thing to do is to minimize the consequences!

Paolo

Thanks for the insights Paolo. I continue to be somewhat in awe of the way the movement control capabilities of the rover are progressively enhanced. What you guys have achieved with a robotic (as opposed to remote control) vehicle, despite all the risk factors involved in pre-programmed logic, is almost unbelievable.

But as with the poets take on Odysseus' journey to Ithaka, don't hurry because wealth (knowledge) will accumulate during the trip. So it is better if the journey lasts for years, then he will not expect Ithaka to make him rich.

This is excellent. Thanks to you all who contributed so far. It will take me a few days to digest all this. I will keep you posted.

Paolo

Fantastic idea Phil. I love it.

Thanks, Phil for the comparison shots, and Tman for that viewer. Due south does seem a lot more attractive now.

Thought it might be interesting to compare different orbiter views of Endeavour...

ENDEAVOUR IMAGES

MGS:

http://global-data.mars.asu.edu/moc/images/E0200373

http://global-data.mars.asu.edu/moc/images/large/E0200373 (east side)

http://global-data.mars.asu.edu/moc/images/large/E0200372

http://global-data.mars.asu.edu/moc/images/E0502642

http://global-data.mars.asu.edu/moc/images/large/E0502643


http://global-data.mars.asu.edu/moc/images/E0500801

http://global-data.mars.asu.edu/moc/images/large/E0500800



THEMIS:

http://themis-data.asu.edu/img/I16825047.html

http://themis-data.asu.edu/img/browse/I16825047

http://themis-data.asu.edu/img/V16826001.html

http://themis-data.asu.edu/img/browse/V168...&stretch=S2


CTX

http://global-data.mars.asu.edu/ctx/img/P0...1780_XI_02S005W

http://global-data.mars.asu.edu/ctx/img/P0...1780_XI_02S005W

http://global-data.mars.asu.edu/ctx/img/T0...1780_XI_02S005W

http://global-data.mars.asu.edu/ctx/img/P1...1789_XN_01S005W


HiRISE:

http://global-data.mars.asu.edu/hirise/img...5779_1775_COLOR

http://global-data.mars.asu.edu/hirise/img...005779_1775_RED

http://global-data.mars.asu.edu/hirise/img...007849_1775_RED

I spent most of the night reconsidering this, and I still agree with you and mhoward, Phil. Your array of HiRise crops was a genius idea for those people who don't have the IAS software or know of the viewer page previously posted for zooming and panning. That general route seems to almost be a no-brainer if the overriding goal to minimize risk, which I think it should be. As we've seen in the past, opportunistic science targets like the cobbles and meteorites are randomly distributed. Ancient craters like Erebus are seen everywhere that bedrock is exposed. Once the rover gets closer to Endeavor, there are some very interesting, previously buried craters that might be worth a visit.

I also find the Anatolia-like fractures fascinating. It appears we will see many of them once Opportunity is as far south as mini-Endurance. I'm not sure how important they will be to the scientists unless we find some that are large enough and safe enough to drive down into where Oppy can study a vertical section of rock.

Paolo: I hate to add another question to the many being thrown at you, but I think this is an easy one, being MER trivia. Some of us occasionally refer to Opportunity as Oppy, as I did above. It's partially an abbreviation convenience, but also an endearing expression. I always wondered if those of you on the MER team had any nicknames for the rovers, or if nicknames were considered to be in bad form.

A consensus is forming! South it is!

I like Phil's comparison shots. What I'm thinking of doing now is taking this and extending it by making a colour coded geologic map overlay for the HiRISE frames based purely on ripple types. I just want to check first to see if anyone else is already working on it because it seems to be the obvious next step.

I'd say, if you can do that, there are many here who would very much like to see your map. I, for one, am dying to see it.

To flap the panels like wings and fly away would make another very cute Rover movie.

<Wish modus on> Speaking of going close to the rim again and the nice late afternoon images of Oppy's shadow spreading down into the crater, wouldn't it be great to have additionally a "large" Navcam sequence of long growing rim shadows in Victoria?
I know you have do battle between what's possible (power, data volume, vehicle capabilities) and what would make for the best science and most stunning photos. And that there's a large number of people who are always looking out for the chance to take cool photos/movies. Therefore it's just more to have mentioned it again

Probably yes.
The "route" I plotted by the east was made backwards (from Mini-Endurance to Victoria) and from that starting point, north was the preferred path. IMO the only difficult area on it is around the point named M-6, definitely not allowed for long drives, but after that point crossing the ripples should be easy.



Good ideas. A sort of map color-coded according to ripple types would be great!

Here an overview with your (over the fence ) route map:

Click to view attachment


This is an overview of partly the same area with a resolution that (could) enables roughly search for routes:
(1.5 MB) http://www.greuti.ch/oppy/overview1.jpg Top left is Explorer.

I knew it! I knew your collective minds would work like clockwork. A color coded map of the current HiRISE would be perfect. I would differentiate between tall ripples (prugatory and above), small ripples, sand/no-ripples, outcrop w/ripples, outcrop. Not more than that, but if it gets too difficult just differentiating between tall ripples and everything else would be a major advantage.

Paolo

I was able to get in the plan some imagery for a pure cool factor (like the Duck Bay egress movie) but sometimes it gets really difficult to include these things in the plan. This is one of them: at the end of the sol there are activities that have to be executed at specific times and imaging would interfere with them. When we were close to Cape Verde we did take some late afternoon shots of the area were we tried to get to. Those images were taken for specific reasons (shadowing) not for cool factor and still it was quite a difficult dance with all the daily activities. Some other images were taken for engineering reasons and came out really great pictures. Jim Bell's "postcards from mars" has many of them. More recently the long shadows rear hazcams and the single eye Navcam of the tracks with Cape Verde in the background are also examples of unintended nice pictures.

Paolo

Yup - I would go

Green : Flat Soil ( like near Fram )
Yellow : Small Ripples ( like Endurance to James Caird )
Orange : Large Ripples ( like Purgatory )
Red : Dune-like-objects (like the northern rim of Erebus - but not, as understand it, actual dunes by definition)
Blue : Outcrop (like East end of Erebus )
Purple : Outcrop with Ripple ( like Erebus-to-Beagle )

AND

Mark interesting features, like linear things in the outcrops in some way.

This is great... but I have to decline personally. I'm way too busy. So go to it, fellow UMSFers.

Phil

I'm with Phil on this...unfortunately I'll have to decline also. I'm way too incompetent.

Well... the only reason I don't support the south route is that I've been looking at it from the point of view of driving a rover that's dragging one wheel. I'd bet that we can get 100+ meters a day in such a configuration, but only over the relatively flat, almost-no-ripple kind of terrain we see to the east-northeast.

Phil's images do a wonderful job of showing that there are areas that aren't much worse than what we saw in the Purgatory area -- but my concern is that when Oppy's wheel fails, we need to be somewhere that won't immediately trap us. I simply don't think that Oppy will be able to cross the lowest ripples in a Purgatory-like area while dragging a wheel, and I see enough Purgatory-like ripple country in the straight south route to believe that, even though it would be perfectly trafficable for Oppy with six good wheels, it will become completely impassable with one bad wheel.

I guess I'm trying to figure out a good way to get Oppy to Endeavour even if a wheel fails. The south route looks like a good route only if no wheels fail. I'm concerned that it will become a rover trap when the wheel fails.

Then again, the only metric by which I can try and forecast wheel failure is what comes out of the MER teams -- and since they decided to get out of Victoria while they still could, I guess I figured the failure was fairly imminent. If it's only imminent while Oppy is inside a crater, nothing in my available data would tell me that...



-the other Doug

Great idea Cody, that's what I want to see too!

Colouring for area ripple orientation and area ripple height (inferred by spacing) is a good idea, but I have a different suggestion:

We could have a "geological" map with differently striped areas, where the striped areas are enlarged images of the prevalent ripple structure in a given area. Either artificially drawn stripes or photographic enlargements of a typical ripple structure in the given area.

We'd then have a clear overview map with striped areas, where stripe width and orientation indicate the structure of the given area. I think that would be a nice tool for large-scale planning of this mega-drive, because the underlying ripple/surface structure would be immediately obvious to the eye, with no extra effort required to "translate" colouring to a particular terrain type. Good map-making is about immediately and instinctively being able to infer information.

A map that could be printed out in 1x2 meters would be a great "overview" tool to hang on the wall in the rover driver's room.

Good idea, BUT ... this mapping process should be automatic otherwise it'll be like painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling i.e. it would take too much time & effort. Does this kind of software exists in the market?

oDoug, regarding the "lame duck scenario" I fear it would be game-over even on flat terrain. I suspect the performance would be similar to Spirit's, so driving would be on the 5-15m/sol range.

I've been thinking about this contour map, wondering about how long it will take, worrying about whether people would agree with my interpretation...

and then I thought- wouldn't it be much better, simpler and more objective to do this as a distributed computing project?

Here's my idea- take the enormous jpeg2000 HiRISE file and split it up into a huge number of small chunks of about the same size as Phil's example. Decide on several 'representative' terrain examples from this set to use as a guide.

Set up a website that will display the half-dozen or so 'guide' squares above one randomly chosen square and a question that says something like 'Which terrain-type does this area show?' The visitor clicks the button for the appropriate square, the answer is recorded and the website refreshes itself!

Once we have enough answers the data can be contoured and overlaid on the original image.

All thoughts/queries/abuse/offers of help welcome!

"Galaxy Zoo" becomes "Dune Zoo". Like it.

Neat idea, but how long to set something like this up, and get a significant amount of classification done? I don't see the MER team waiting for this, to be honest.

I thought that it was worthwhile providing a link to one of the most interesting images in the "After Victoria" thread:



The fact that Oppy can see the rim of Endeavour crater from its present location shows that Endeavour is not really that far away. Note that the vertical scale has been exagerated in this view to allow the shape of this hill to be more clearly seen.

I can't remember this very well so I could be wrong, but I seem to remember doing some analysis that suggested that that was a feature on the far rim. So where we are going is even closer.

James

-- Just trying to work out how to load jpeg-2000 images using a decent programming language with the aim of finding ways of classifying ripples automatically.

Cool. Found some useful information on exporting them to other formats:

http://orrery.us/node/61

Would HiRise photos taken when the sun is low in the sky help? Ideally you'd have shadows everywhere you want to avoid.

Remembering how the MER-B images had to be stretched vertically to highlight the subtleties in them, I was wondering if it would work to do the opposite, i.e. visually compress satellite images, to get a better grasp of the navigability of the terrain and those long parallel dunes. Fortunately the ripples are almost due N-S oriented, so it was easy to test my idea with the available HiRise jp2 images. I cut long N-S 'bands' from the general south-eastern side of Victoria (in PSP_001414_1780_RED), all the same size, the same distance from each other, 150 m wide, 3300 m long, 600 m apart. Then I shortened the bands to 10 % of their original lenght and made a side-by-side collage of them for navigability comparison. The leftmost image shows a similar-sized compressed band of Oppy's earlier path.

I have labeled some familiar places along the earlier route. The composition is radically diminished from its original size to fit here, but I hope you still can make some sense of it and that it's enjoyable to rover driver(s) and all us backseaters as well.

Concurring with many previous posts, I think we can relatively safely assume that Oppy has already seen the worst of it concerning the dunes.

When you open UMSF after a 3 days break and see a new topic with over 130 replies, you know there's a big news around.
So, we're (again) looking for a 2 years exploration journey...NeverEndeavouring Story...
You're right Paolo, there are fantastic minds in UMSF and we also have the best job in the world...

Err - we know exactly how far away Endeavour is. It's twice as far as Endurance is from our current location.

As for HiRISE with Low Sun. Not going to happen - HiRISE is in a sun-synch orbit (at about 3pm local I think ) whereby anywhere other than the poles has basically the same lighting whenever you image it.

Doug

*long time lurker, first post*

That's done already. It's HiRISE Clickworkers.

http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/landforms?camera=hirise

If a version was released to mark different dune landforms at highest resolution on a small set of HiRISE images, I think after making an 'Internet call' the data could be gathered in a few days.

Here's two cents worth from another newbie who has been a longtime lurker:

Keep number of dune crossings and number of wheel rotations low - after all there are only a finite number left! - while staying on pavement as much as possible. Navigate the hard part now while the rover is "young and healthy."

A list of nominal distances/headings is found below for five legs. …generally to the south until the terrain gets better. Legs 2 and 3 are dicey, but look drivable.

1. From present location proceed 1900 m at 153 degrees to small crater that is directly south of east rim of Victoria.
2. Proceed 570 m at 184 degrees to tiny crater/cobble?
3. Proceed 470 m at 162 degrees to small crater.
4. Proceed 1300 m at 166 degrees to old crater.
5. Proceed 1550 m at 132 degrees to inspect giraffe.
6. Ask giraffe for directions.

Closer examination shows that there are a number of reasonable paths along the nominal drive directions for each leg, a particularly attractive feature if an escape route is needed in the event of unforeseen difficulties.

Holy mackrel dere, Beauford! You're way ahead of us all! Can you show us this track drawn on a maximum HiRISE resolution image of the area? At least the first few km from Victoria. Small craters make fine waypoints since they can often be spotted from a distance in pancam images. They also offer places where the edges of the surface bedrock may be exposed for closeup examination. But we are also supposed to be looking for interesting cobble/ejecta along the way, and clusters of these can also be seen in HiRISE views and pancams. So let's mark out a few kilometers of track that connect such waypoints at roughly 100 meter intervals, so Oppy can make a good sols autonomous hike, avoiding large dune crests wherever possible, and then take good pancam views of the nearby cobble or crater waypoint to decide whether it's worth a sol's delay for closeup study. As long as we keep more-or-less to the southeast, and stay out of sandtraps, we'll get to Endeavour one of these sols!

Not much new here, but: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/news/mer-20080922.html

SS confirms something that was sort of hinted at on Science Friday: they expect to find more cobbles by going south.

(...snip! excellent web-app based distributed computing idea...)
This was pretty much what I was thinking of as I read the last four pages of ideas, but...

I was thinking of the way UMSFers produced a full transcript of a long Steve Squyres interview in a couple of days, by splitting it into two or three minute chunks; here's my variant of SFJCody's suggestion. It might(??) be able to produce results a little faster? No programming required at the start, though a little Perl would help to automate production of the finished product.

• One of the gurus drops a reasonably fine-scale grid over a the best HiRISE shots of the entire area. Make each grid square, say, 100m x 100m. (My back-of-a-fag-packet guesstimate gives, very roughly, seven thousand 100m x 100m squares.) Victoria roughly at top left, Endeavour at bottom right.
• Number them off.
• Start a thread where people announce that they're working on (x) number of squares (avoiding duplication.)
• Give everyone a Stookovision flashcard identifying terrain types, perhaps numbered 1-10 based on an estimate of how travesible they'd be (or dune types/heights, whatever the gurus deem best!).
• The volunteers mark the terrain of each square according to the key. (Perhaps each square's broken into a hundred 10m x 10m sub-squares.)
• the volunteer returns the data in a simple numerical format - ten rows of ten comma-separated values, say, with a one-line header giving the square's index number.
• (the difficult bit) someone, perhaps with a little script-fu, uses these raw numbers to generate a colour-coded overlay for the original mega-image.

Good/bad idea? This would allow people to contribute according to the time they can put into it; allows people like me who'd love to contribute, but haven't the imaging chops (or knowledge / experience of the non-imaging domain experts here) to do so in a small way.

Just sent this mail to the Mars Clickworkers organizers:

"Dear Mars Clickworkers organizer,

I would like to direct your attention to this thread

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...=5476&st=75

Here MER rover driver "Paolo" from the JPL is asking the unmannedspaceflight community members what their thoughts are behind their suggestions as to which route Opportunity should take on its coming trek towards Endeavour crater (posting no. 77): "Once we extricate the rover from the current position (we tried to reach a pretty compelling science target knowing full well the likelihood of success was low) we will head for Endevour. I have seen some suggestions from you guys about paths to follow. While it is premature to analyze the terrain until we have HiRISE, I'd like to understand what was your line of reasoning behind the path, what data you used and how you made the assessment."

Further along in the thread, the idea of analysing the dune fields separating Opportunity from Endeavour crater as a distributed computing project is raised. Forum member "Fran Ontanaya" then mentions your Mars clickworkers project.

So, the issue I want to put before you is this: could Mars Clickworkers help analysing the dune fields between Victoria crater and Endeavour crater, with the aim of helping the rover drivers get a good traversability map? It would involve categorising different types of dune fields, maybe along the lines of what forum member Phil Stooke shows in posting no. 101 of the above-mentioned thread (see image in the posting). If a map can be produced within the next couple of weeks it will be highly useful to the rover drivers.

I am a lowly unmannedspaceflight member, not involved with the rovers directly, so any reply would be more than welcome in the thread itself, rather than to me (joining the forums is free of charge).

Thank you so much for your attention,

Yours,

SD (forum member "Oersted")"

This thread moves pretty quickly! I should have guessed something like this already existed for HiRISE




Yep more great ideas! Re: conversion of the raw data into an image product: as long as the finished data has an x, a y, and a 'ripple value' it should be straightforward to load the data into Surfer as a grid and contour it to make a colour coded overlay.

On another note, I am wondering whether the Amazon.com "Mechanical Turk" couldn't also be of help. Lots of people helped looking for Steve Fossetts' crash site, why not maybe categorising dune fields?

I still think a manual line map - similar to good old b/w geographical maps - would be better, but let's not close any possibly productive avenues!

Hot diggity dam', you guys are proposing the Manhatten Project of MER exploration! Given our vast manpower resources - We have the tools; we have the talent! - it could probably be done on time and under budget, but is it really necessary? Don't the best HiRise images show clearly the places we want to avoid and the sites we ought to visit? Given aerials of that quality, can't somebody just take a pencil (with an eraser) and sketch out a viable track that gets us down the road a decent interval each sol, and passes a point of interest at least every few sols?
After all, it's the journey to Ithaca, not the arrival time that matters, right Rui?