in time for dreams

This news on the Opportunity landing site just slipped in before I could get to sleep. I spent a couple of hours this afternoon looking at Mike Malin's 10m/px MOC image of the Opportunity landing site trying to locate the DIMES-imaged craters but without success.

I had on the blinder of bad information --that Opportunity was about 24 km downrange from the center of the ellipse (I'm pretty sure that's what Richard Cook said in the post-EDL press brief), so I wasn't having any luck finding what should have been pretty easy to locate. The DIMES image showed what was reported to be a 150 meter crater and no 150 meter crater could be found in the 20-30 km from center area.

Well, it looks like it was bit further than 24 km. By my rough Photoshop measure on the MOC composite, it's more like 37 km. Well, unfortunately it's also located in one of the lower resolution sections of that great MOC composite. I eagerly await Mike's IMC high-res photos :-) It'll be interesting to find out which of those craters in the DIMES image is hosting the Opportunity rover.

update: I guess it's possible I just mis-heard and Richard said miles, not kilometers. That would work out pretty well for placing the rover near that crater highlighted in the astrobio article. That crater seems a bit bigger than the 150 meters that's been mentioned several times, though. By my rough estimates, it's at least 200, maybe as large as 250 meters across. I guess we'll have to wait on Mike Malin's awesome camera to tell us.

So much for falling asleep. I've been playing around in Photoshop and I think I've managed to line up three of the much smaller craters from the DIMES image and the astrobio article location seems to actually fit quite nicely. When sized to fit with the 10m/px MOC image, the large crater measures approximately 220 meters across and located about 37 km from the center of the ellipse.

It's likely that the lander touched down near the center of the DIMES image and it probably bounced no more than about 1 kilometer. That should put Opportunity no further than 1.65 km from the big crater and possibly much closer.

another update from slinted, in the comments, comes word that Doug Ellison made the match here. That looks like about 25 kilometers to me and it sure does match up pretty. Also, that crater looks a lot closer to 150 meters in diameter. Excellent work Doug!

Posted by asa at January 26, 2004 01:33 AM