The Planetary Society Blog
By Emily Lakdawalla
Opportunity is on the road again
Jun. 19, 2006 | 17:22 PDT | Jun. 20 00:22 UTC
Opportunity is again making speedy progress on the road south toward Victoria Crater. It looks like the rover is heading for a landmark called "Beagle Crater," a hole in the ground about 35 meters in diameter. That makes it a little smaller than Vostok but a little bigger than Eagle, two other holes in the ground that Opportunity has visited. What's unusual about Beagle, though, is the apparent brightness of the deposits around it; it's quite visible as a very bright linear feature on Opportunity's horizon, and in the orbital views (see below) you can see what almost looks like a bright splash around it. Could that mean it's a fresher crater than the others that Opportunity has visited? That would be cool, if true. Opportunity has a little more than 300 meters to go to get there, around 10 or 15 driving days. The rover is in restricted sols now, meaning it can only drive every other day because of the timing of orbital communications passes, so that means about 3 or 4 weeks until the rover approaches the crater. After that -- only 500 meters more to Victoria. Beagle crater on the horizonOn Opportunity's sol 843, the rover had its eyes set on a bright feature popping above the dunes near the horizon, the 35-meter-diameter crater named Beagle after the ship that carried Charles Darwin on his journey. It is also a tip of the hat to ESA's ill-fated Beagle 2 lander. Credit: NASA / JPL / Marco di Lorenzo |
Below left is the route map that Phil Stooke is working on for Opportunity; below right is an update, showing the part of the trip from Erebus to Beagle.Opportunity route map to sol 781
| Opportunity route map, sols 626 to 854These maps were assembled by planetary cartographer Phil Stooke from detailed comparisons of MOC base images to views generated from rover imagery. It is a work in progress; future work will include improving the quality of the base images and adding future progress of the rover. Credit: NASA / JPL / MSSS / Phil Stooke |
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