If you’ve been worried by the lack of updates recently, let me set your mind at rest. There’s nothing wrong with Oppy, she’s fine, there’s not a problem. But there has been a problem with the orbiting MARS ODYSSEY probe, which acts as a relay for signals between Oppy and Earth, and that problem has meant a break in images from the Mars Exploration Rover. Until today there hd been no new images for us to look at for several days, but a few have trickled back now, allowing us – and by “us” I mean Eduardo Tesheiner, UMSF’s cartographical genius – to figure out Oppy’s most recent position on Cape York.
Here’s one of the latest pictures, enhanced to bring out detail…
Now, if you take that picture and apply a little bit of imagemagery trickery, you can see something very interesting…
…and that shows very clearly that Oppy is now standing almost on the very northern edge of Cape York! Eduardo Tesheiner created this pic on Google Mars, with his calculated position for Oppy…
…and here’s my version of that, showing Oppy’s latest position on the ‘shore’ of Cape York…
Hope Oppy spots a nice big fat vein of gypsum soon!
Now that Oppy has reached the yellow brick road, I wonder it it will travel along the road to the right or to the left.