Martian Vistas

Opportunity has just entered a small area of small ripples, this is a small rest as it not the end of the ripples, there is still a couple of km to go until the 'parking lot' but there are no more large 'rover trap' ripple fields. I thought it would be a good time to revisit the ripple mapping work I did a year or two back, looking at the terrain between Oppy tosol (2328) and her next major destination Santa Maria Crater.

The map below covers the area from where Oppy is now, yellow dot in the top-left, to Santa Maria at the bottom-right. The colours represent the size of the ripples: green - no or insignificant ripples, blue - medium sized ripples that shouldn't be a rover hazard (like the ones Oppy has been crossing recently) and red - large ripples to avoid.

Oppy as just entered a small green island and will soon head back into more of the medium sized ripples that she has been crossing recently. Then after another 400m or so she'll start to encounter terrain that is a patchwork of medium ripple fields, small ripple fields, and pavement (which shows up as light blue patches in the image). I expect Oppy will be able to drive almost exclusively on the solid rock pavement for much of this. After about 2km, Oppy will be at the flat 'parking-lot' terrain like that around her landing site in Eagle crater. From there it's another 2km to Santa Maria.

1m/pixel Resolution (4152 x 768) ( 1MB )
2m/pixel Resolution (2076 x 384) ( 315kB )