There are two good blogs with people really on the ball following the Mars rovers (including a couple of apparent insiders):

http://mer.rlproject.com/index.php?act=idx - where I got the two recent images

http://www.markcarey.com/mars/ - go to the forum

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

I thought I saw you over there, ToSeek!

Just a note to all - Please tread lightly on the mer.rlproject board - and don't (heaven forfend!) mention it on sl*shd*t.... A lot of fine folks are posting pics over there and I don't think Doug has the bandwidth to handle the geek hordes dowloading at once.... Even our noble BABB felt the Wrath of Fark a few days back and was knocked down for a bit.#-o

It's really a most excellent board, though. Strict No Woo Woo Policy.
:wink: Let's keep it our little secret and no one gets hurt and we all stay nice and happy. :wink:

ON TOPIC - Love this view

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Lyford Rome
"Zis is not nuts, zis is super-nuts!"
Mathematician Richard Courant on viewing an Orion test

Regarding the bottom left rock, I can already imagine the following:

Hoagland says: "Martian sculpture gives evidence of Martians having a bad mood!

seriously, Nice view indeed. Is that Vostok in the distance? (it looks too close and too small for that?)

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

Note that woo-woos are allowed on the Mark Carey board.

They have some very good posters there, but also some real wackos.

I hope the rlproject site never gets mentioned on the Mark Carey board for that reason.

Proof that Stan Lee has been on Mars!



I know -- signal to noise ratio is off for my taste...

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Lyford Rome
"Zis is not nuts, zis is super-nuts!"
Mathematician Richard Courant on viewing an Orion test

Could this be Vostok?

Note: There are several other shots of the crater in the Pancam folder for this Sol.

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http://boinc.mundayweb.com/one/stats...033/prj:6/.png

I think Opportunity is still among the three small craters on the way to Vostok. Vostok is about half the diameter of Endurance, so I think it would be bigger than this.

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Whether it's Vostok, or not, it looks as if there are enough interesting things to look at here, for at least a few weeks.

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http://boinc.mundayweb.com/one/stats...033/prj:6/.png

I used to post at Mark Cary's board quite a bit. Unfortunately, as pointed out, the signal to noise ratio is staggeringly high. It is not just the usual woo's known across many boards - some have been here - but a fairly persistant default attitude that "NASA" is hiding the truth, scientists are incompetent, and that any rational person would recognise that Mars is a planet with a blue sky, abundant liquid water on the surface and crawling with life. Anyone with any knowledge of Mars or even basic geology and biology is treated with contempt. I thought it might be worthwhile to try and show pople on how to actually think scientifically, point them to the literature etc., but without success. There has been no change of growth in the ethos at all. I was getting cranky and wasting too much time there. So I pulled the pin.

However, there are some people who do beautiful images there, plus the maps of the rover's progress are a treat. So I still lurk from time to time.

Jon

I keep thinking what would happen if some of those folks were actually sent to Mars (an essentially airless world colder than Antartica), and, in some sort of evil way, we could watch their reaction before they died.

Evil, yes, sad, yes, horrifying, perhaps, but still in some way an interesting experiment to watch the reaction as they realize their errors.

This is no different from the rest of the pseudoscientific community. They are all convinced that from a tiny amount of empirical evidence (e.g. a single photograph) they can divine a secret truth that eludes the rest of us. Some of them, since they cannot fathom how we could possibly miss this evidence, conclude that there must be a cover up.

I think a lot of it boils down to the fact that for many there is a great desire for there to be "something more" to their lives than the usual humdrum, day-to-day existence. Even better if it's you that managed to "discover" evidence that no one else has found.

Few of these people realise quite how much time, money, and effort it takes to make real scientific discoveries and breakthroughs. That is unfortunate since it tends to lead people to belittle the hard graft scientists and engineers put in over many years.

It only took 5 minutes to find a face-like feature in a Viking photograph. It took 20 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to conclusively (to most anyway) debunk it.

Actually I think all you would have to do is send them to any real Mars science consortium, their heads would still explode a la the Screaming Schwarzenegger Effect in Total Recall....

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Lyford Rome
"Zis is not nuts, zis is super-nuts!"
Mathematician Richard Courant on viewing an Orion test

Latest route map

Should be at Vostok within the week.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

i wouldn't take much notice of the long term route maps or plans, they've never turned out to be reliable, rover planners usually make last minute changes to their plans.

BTW - I wouldn't get too excited about the prospect of seeing Vostok. Compared to the plains, no doubt it will be fun to see, but I've seen Endurance Crater, and Vostok ain't no Endurance Crater

Victoria crater's where the real actions at! :P

honestly, I don't understad why they keep stopping at those rocks and craters like the current one or even "Vostok" at all.
None of those craters seems to be that different from what we've already seen at Eagle, Fram, Endurance etc. etc.
From the orbiter views, Vostok too just looks like another one of the known Meridiani Craters. We have already studied this type of crater for months, especially at Enurance ...

So wouldn't it make much more sense to take adantage of the remaining life-time of the rovers to reach entirely different types of terrain as fast as possible, like, e.g. the "etched terrain" ?

At full speed travel we could cover about 1 kilometer each week: imagine the entirely new horizons and new types geological terrains, even outside the landing ellipse, that could be reached at that speed !

Imagine it this way: It would be almost as if we had landed a new rover in a different area of mars (for the price of one rover :-)

So, please JPL-people: stop looking at *every* rock and little crater on the way (we have already collected many times more than the expected science data) and use the remaing life time to go for new discoveries behind new horizons

I can see stopping briefly to take samples in various areas - to see if the new area really is the same as the old one. (I'm not entirely sure the rovers have the power resources to do a kilometer a week - they may have to take a break to recharge.) But I can't say I understand the recent decision to spend about 20 sols in the middle of Meridiani Planum sampling the sand.

Squyres seems to think Vostok might be something different - he resists referring to it as a crater, though no one's explained why. I think it's worth taking a peek at it, at least.

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yes, that's exactly the point:
why not just stopping and sampling just briefly and then quickly move on unless something really new is found ?

Instead, almost every time they stop it seems that we have to wait several weeks until moving on ...

Of course this extended analysis does make perfect sense whenever we encounter something new for the first time (e.g., heat-shield, meteorite) but not for the second, third time and so on ....

Trekking again - Not a long stop at the three craters, at least. Should get to Vostok in another few sols.

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=D> Go Oppy, go

... on to Vostok and beyond !

Still no obvious sign of Vostok in the latest pancam images from Opportunity. Very strange.