Full text: http://athena.cornell.edu/news/mubss/
Update from Steve Squyres (Principal Investigator)
We seem to have cleared an important hurdle. Sol 944, which was yesterday Earth time, was "Boot Day" for Opportunity... the day we rebooted the rover computer with brand new flight software. The rover woke up that afternoon with the new software running, and sent us data right on schedule. We're still going through the data, but so far everything looks good. We're also going through the same process for Spirit on more or less the same timescale.
Anyway, once we've got this initial few sols of software checkout behind us, we know where we're going! As of right now, we are just about 50 meters away from the rim of Victoria Crater. The latest images show the upper part of the far wall in some detail for the first time. The topography there is substantial, to say the least... the images show near-vertical cliffs that are roughly 15 meters high, and that's just the upper lip. There's a lot more crater below that that we can't see yet.
Pic: http://207.7.139.5/mars/opportunity/navcam/2006-09-19/1N211904063EFF7600P1968L0M1.JPG
The features on the wall of the far rim are about half a mile away and this was taken with a camera (navcam) that has equivelant field of view to a 36mm lens.
Here is Victoria Crater, the rover is about 50m from the rim now. Things are going to get pretty interesting soon
:
Update from Steve Squyres (Principal Investigator)
We seem to have cleared an important hurdle. Sol 944, which was yesterday Earth time, was "Boot Day" for Opportunity... the day we rebooted the rover computer with brand new flight software. The rover woke up that afternoon with the new software running, and sent us data right on schedule. We're still going through the data, but so far everything looks good. We're also going through the same process for Spirit on more or less the same timescale.
Anyway, once we've got this initial few sols of software checkout behind us, we know where we're going! As of right now, we are just about 50 meters away from the rim of Victoria Crater. The latest images show the upper part of the far wall in some detail for the first time. The topography there is substantial, to say the least... the images show near-vertical cliffs that are roughly 15 meters high, and that's just the upper lip. There's a lot more crater below that that we can't see yet.
Pic: http://207.7.139.5/mars/opportunity/navcam/2006-09-19/1N211904063EFF7600P1968L0M1.JPG
The features on the wall of the far rim are about half a mile away and this was taken with a camera (navcam) that has equivelant field of view to a 36mm lens.
Here is Victoria Crater, the rover is about 50m from the rim now. Things are going to get pretty interesting soon
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