Ok, where ARE we..?

The image drought continues – no raw images have been posted on the “main” sites since Oct 4th. Some thumbnails are being posted on the ‘tracking’ site, but they don’t show much, so I’m not not going to do much (if anything) with them here. But, thanks to UMSF’s cartographer and navigator extraordinaire Eduardo Tesheiner I can at least show you where Oppy has gotten to since the last images were seen…

You can see Oppy is working her way up and along a kind of “shoreline” of bedrock plates, heading eastwards towards Endeavour. This obviously means that she isn’t going to head south to that rather interesting-looking cluster of young craters I looked at in a previous post…

Which is a shame, because I think we’d have got some cracking photos – but this isn’t a tourist trip, Oppy’s not there to (just) take pretty pictures, she’s a scientific explorer, a robot geologist, and her job now is to cross this great unforgiving desert and make it to Endeavour crater…

Here’s a colourised crop from the hiRISE image I use the most for this blog. I’ve marked where Tesheiner has placed Oppy on his charts (red circle) and I’m wondering if there’s another meteorite up ahead.? (yellow circle)

It would be helpful if we had some pan- or navcam images of the terrain up ahead to show if I’m right, but it’s no big deal; it was made clear recently that Oppy won’t be stopping for meteorites again for quite a while, and that it’s ‘pedal to the metal’ time. Still, would be nice to see if I’m right!

So what’s next? Well, Oppy is making her way towards a small crater called “Santa Maria”. Here’s where it is in relation to her current position and course…

The hope now amongst rover watchers is that when the images start flowing again, Santa Maria will have become visible up ahead…

Guess we’ll just have to wait and see…

Finally, those all-important numbers:

Distance to Santa Maria: 2.4km

Distance to Endeavour: 8.5km

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