Apologies for the past week’s lack of posts (if anyone noticed, out there!), I’ve been away stargazing from the middle of a forest in the middle of the back of beyond of nowhere. Back now, and time to catch up…
Actually, there’s not a huge amount to catch up on. Opportunity is still slowly but surely making her way down towards “Perseverance Valley”, an ancient gully. Note, “PV” is very old hence the emphasis on “ancient”. It’s no longer wet or active, it’s basically just a ditch carved out of the rock by running water long, long ago. But Oppy isn’t going there because of what PV is now, she’s going there to study what it used to be and what happened in and around it.
We still can’t quite see PV yet, it remains just out of view over the edge of the slope, and to be honest I doubt the view will be all that dramatic when Opportunity eventually looks down upon the Valley, there’s not a lot of depth to this feature, but I might – and will hope to – be proved wrong. In the meantime, here are the latest views… Let’s start with the best – the wide angle view…
Wow… that’s something, isn’t it? What a spectacular view… really, really hope we’re going to see that in colour soon…
What we can see in colour are smaller scale views like these…
NASA is describing that as a “fresh impact crater”, on the Meridiani Plain close to where Opportunity is at the moment. Now, I collect meteorites, and as soon as I saw that I wanted to run across those rippled dust dunes and scoop up some of those dark rocky meteorite fragments scattered across the plain..!
Another colourised view for you all…
I expect we’ll have some more images back from Opportunity very soon, so check back here to see how she’s getting on.
The Road To Endeavour 