Another sol, another drive for #Perseverance. The rover is approaching the northern edge of the rocky Margin Unit, getting closer to where #Ingenuity is located after its eventful #Flight72, but it still has no line-of-sight to the #MarsHelicopter. It may be in a better position for a first look in a sol or two, as seen in the visibility plot below.
This Memorial Day added an interesting twist to the daily grind of #Perseverance 🙂 Not only did it clear the rest of the rego-ripples it had to the north, but took advantage of the holiday to go on a picnic at a nice hill to the northeast 😀 🙃. Apparently the hill has a geological story to tell and the team's geologists are eager to hear it.
New 30m drive and new location for #Perseverance on Sol 1114, RMC 51.2990, the closest so far to #Ingenuity, just 360m south of it, and very close to the edge of the south Neretva Vallis riverbank.
New location for #Perseverance on Sol 1136, RMC 52.0606. If all goes smoothly, in two more similar drives the rover will be entering the field-of-view of #Ingenuity's RTE color camera, and Perseverance's team will have their last and only opportunity to have a picture of the rover captured from the ground of Mars, at least for the foreseeable future.
Any idea where JPL have moved the Mars mission maps to? The old URL for M20 and MSL are broken. They have just reformatted a number of mission pages (raw images, home pages etc), but I cant find the new URLs for the maps...
#Ingenuity's #Flight55 was announced on Exitter on Aug 9, but not on any other #NASA site. It will cover a distance of 250m, presumably to somewhere west of its current location.
Here is my previous guess, now adjusted to the new distance; it goes along a (guessed too) route #Perseverance may take toward Mandu Wall.
The #MarsHelicopter is about 600m away and not visible by #Perseverance at its current location at RMC 46.0000. Despite that, it was able to send a color RTE image to the rover, so obviously the UHF radio link is workable, even without LOS.
The visibility plot below shows that Jurabi Point is visible from #Ingenuity's location, so the radio link should be expected to be even better, if/when the rover gets there.
With the ink that printed the announcement of a successful #Flight57 still wet (yeah, that was the cliche back in the day of paper news), #Ingenuity's #Flight58 is now announced for Sep 11, 2023:
New location for #Perseverance on Sol 1144, RMC 52.1950.
This may be the last location visible by #Ingenuity's RTE camera, as the rover has now reached the theoretical limit of its field-of-view (cyan line). The #MarsHelicopter has been programmed to capture one RTE image every sol for as long as it is able to wake up every sol perform its routine of gathering environmental and system data, as a stationary testbed.
On Sol 1168 the rover moved to RMC 52.5032 across the ancient riverbed and stopped a few meters away from a light colored layer of rock at the foot of the northern bank, which appears to be the same layer with that of Bright Angel.
¹"the bacon strip": unofficial name for a light colored layer of rock back at the Three Forks area.
New location for #Perseverance on Sol 908: RMC 44.3978.
Initial estimate, based solely on metadata, has the rover about 280m to the west, descending to lower ground through a smooth opening on the edge of Mandu Wall, right on the planned route.
The #MMGIS map sometimes shows a detailed path for an #Ingenuity flight. When that happens, one can see exactly how the #MarsHelicopter responds to changes in the terrain underneath it. Here we also see its hazard avoidance capability in action, choosing the best location just before landing.
#Perseverance seems to be determined to reach Bright Angel as soon as possible, even if it has to do it in short drives every sol, through rocky ground.
If the #MarsHelicopter#Ingenuity does take an RTE picture every Martian morning as stated, then it will most probably capture the rover as it descends slowly the slope of Neretva riverbank. The only question then is when we will see those images.
New location for #Perseverance on Sol 1143, RMC 52.1700, presumably still within #Ingenuity's field-of-view. It appears there may be as many as 3 frames of the rover crossing the FOV of the color RTE camera of the #MarsHelicopter, now a stationary testbed collecting images, temperature and other data on a solly basis from its final location at Vallinor Hills.
#Perseverance drove 10m on Sol 1150, to RMC 52.2638. As mentioned earlier, this appears to be the most difficult part of the descent to the ancient riverbed of Neretva Vallis, on the way to Bright Angel, a rock formation of geological interest.
The maps were drawn with @QGIS, using data from #NASA's #MMGIS, imagery from #HiRISE and DTMs from #USGS
New location for #Perseverance on Sol 1156, after a rather short ~16m drive downhill, which brought the rover 2m lower, to RMC 52.2750. There is now a ~10m remaining vertical distance to be covered to the bottom of the riverbank and onto the ancient riverbed of Neretva Vallis.