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.

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The R21 colour drive direction mosaic from sol 2311.

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Here is a 3D anaglyph of the hills on Oppy's horizon Endeavour and Iazu. The effect is a little subtle and as there isn't a huge amount for detail for your eyes to lock onto it isn't that easy to see; I found if I sat back a bit and looked at the whole image it worked best. You should be able to see the larger hills on the left (Cape Tribulation) pop out of the screen as this is closest to Oppy (~12km away). The hills in the middle (Cape Dromedary & Point Hicks) level with the screen (~15km) and the fainter hills of Iazu crater behind (35-40km).

This image was made by combining views taken on sol 2247 (right eye) and sol 2289 (left eye). In between these dates Oppy moved some 650m east, creating a long enough baseline for the stereo to be seen. The 'effective' baseline (the distance moved perpendicular to the view direction) is around half this value (~300m) as Oppy is heading in the general direction of these hills.

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It seems like an eternity since I had the time to do any MER image processing. Just to as a test to see if i still remember how here is a very quick go at the sol 2300 drive direction mosaic with the hills of Endeavour crater ahead.

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Tosol is 2300 for Opportunity. Every 100 sols I plot the position of Opportunity on a large scale map to get a larger overview of the progress she is making towards Endeavour Crater. This complements the detailed daily maps posted on The Route Map thread at UMSF. Previously I've posted these directly to that thread, but when I noticed how long it's been since I posted anything here (a combination of illness, 17 month old child and broken image pipeline) I thought I'd throw it up here as well!

Opportunities landing site is at the top left (sol 1) Victoria Crater 1/4 of the way down the image (sols 1000 to 1600) and Endeavour crater is at the bottom right. The brown line shows the future path passing Santa Maria Crater before heading to Cape York at Endeavour.

Opportunity has made steady progress and is now 1.12km from where she was 100 sols ago. The actual distance traveled is however considerably greater as she made a large dog-leg around the corner large ripple field to the north. It's great to finally see Oppy actually moving towards her destination!

The second (coloured) map has an overlay of the ripple sizes (red large, blue small, green none) using the Fourier mapping technique that I posted here a long time ago. As you can see Oppy is past the worst of the ripples and will soon be out on the flat 'parking lot' terrain.

Click images for full size versions.

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San Antonio (Twin) Craters from the east.

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All the Drive direction mosaics taken as Oppy drove between Concepción and San Antonio craters.

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Here is the finished pan taken while Opportunity was examining the rocks at 'Chocolate Hills' (as seen at the bottom of the image) next to Concepción Crater.

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At last the final pieces of the Concepción Crater pan are down. Here is my attempt at the final product.

Concepción is an amazing place with all the rocks strewn around forming crater rays, however most dramatic of all is the horizon with many peaks forming the rims of Endeavour, Izau and (if you look very closely, ~1/3 in from the right) you can see Bopolu Crater.

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I wasn't going to post this, as there is more to add that was taken on sol 2156 but isn't downlinked yet. However as the previous Concepción Crater still hasn't been fully downlinked after several weeks, I'm keen to post something new.

Notice the very faint hills on the horizon about 1/4 in from the right edge - that is Bopolu Crater more than 50km away!

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