Long drives at last for Opportunity (or, getting your kicks on sol 1,666)

It's been way, way, way too long since the view from either rover's cameras has changed very much. So I hope you'll join me in a shout of "woo hoo!" or perhaps "yippee!" as I show you the latest view from Opportunity, from sol 1,666, as automatically composed in Mike Howard's Midnight Mars Browser software:

Click to enlarge > Screen capture from Midnight Mars Browser, Opportunity sol 1,666

As of sol 1,666, Opportunity had driven about 250 meters south of Duck Bay, the point at which it had entered Victoria crater an Earth year before. In this panorama it is looking across Cape Victory toward the crater. Most of the panorama is built of larger Navcam frames; the smaller images in the center of the panorama are higher-resolution images taken with the Pancam, and indicate Opportunity's next likely drive direction. Credit: NASA / JPL / Cornell / Midnight Mars Browser (Michael Howard)

If you aren't among the people who have given over 25 GB of your hard drive to Midnight Mars Browser, Mike has helpfully exported this view as a Quicktime VR panorama, on which you can click and drag your mouse to spin the view around.

That hole in the ground is, of course, Victoria crater, Opportunity's neighborhood for the last Mars year or so. We're about to leave it in the rear-view mirror, but not before taking one last parting view. You don't even need to read A. J. S. Rayl's latest rover update (although you should go read that!) to figure out what's going to happen next; the only clues you need are in the panorama above. At the end of any long drive, the rovers usually grab at least a partial panorama with their Navigation Cameras (Navcams) to get a good fix on where they are. The Navcams are black-and-white only and are the lower- resolution of the rovers' mast-mounted cameras; you don't need very many Navcam images to make a complete 360-degree view around the rover. In the panorama above, you can see parts of five Navcam frames tiling Opportunity's horizon, and a further two that fill in the space immediately in front of the rover's wheels. But on top of that, you see four much smaller tiles. Those are Pancam frames. Pancam has roughly three times higher resolution than Navcam; the tradeoff is that it takes more Pancam shots to cover the world around Opportunity. So at the end of a drive, they take Pancam shots only in the direction that they plan to drive next, giving the rover drivers a detailed view of the terrain at a distance from the rover. On any Midnight Mars Browser panorama, the location of the Pancam shots tells you where the rover drivers are aiming Opportunity next. In this case, they're aimed at the crater rim -- so they're planning on driving Opportunity toward the rim, presumably to get a good look back at the crater.

Here's a tidbit of the route map maintained by Eduardo Tesheiner, with the basic outlines of Opportunity's near-term future path (as articulated by Steve Squyres) marked in blue.

More at www.planetary.org