Dave's other cars keep going

[dlavery]

To get a sense of what Victoria Crater is like, take a look at this image:



In this image, north is to the left. The red line traces out the traverse path of the rover from landing (January 24, 2004) through Sol 930 (September 5, 2006). The image covers nearly six kilometers side-to-side. Victoria Crater is the large crater on the right side of the image.

Opportunity landed in Eagle Crater, a small 10-meter diameter crater at the left end of the red line in the image. At this scale, Eagle Crater isn't really even visible. Six months after landing, the rover made it's way to Endurance Crater. This is the crater visible in the center of the left side of the image, at the "corner" of the red line. Opportunity spent six months exploring Endurance, collecting some of the most detailed images ever received from Mars. After exiting from Endurance, Opportunity has spent the last year driving approximately five kilometers toward Victoria Crater, stopping to explore many locations along the way. At this time, Opportunity is about 100 meters away from the rim of Victoria Crater. As you can see, this is the most significant feature in the region around the landing site. At nearly 750 meters across and 70 meters deep, Victoria is a very big hole! The top 75 meters of the crater rim may be nearly vertical rock cliffs. The view from the top of the crater rim promises to provide some of the most spectacular images ever seen from the surface of Mars.

Opportunity is capable of covering the remaining distance to the crater rim in one Sol driving cycle (a Sol is a Martian day, about 24 hours and 40 minutes). However, it will be about another week to ten days before we actually get to the crater rim. We will be slowly approaching the crater. Along the way we will be continuing our study of the annulus material around the crater, to establish a baseline of the minerology and compositional chemisty of the crater exterior. Once that is complete we will make the final approach to the crater rim and take the first look inside. Those images will be pretty amazing. They will be posted on the web almost as quickly as we receive them. So keep watching here - this should be good!

Not too bad for a little rover that was only supposed to last 90 days and drive 600 meters.

-dave