New location for #Perseverance on Sol 932, even further into the "broken slab" area to the NW, which however doesn't seem to be difficult for the rover.
A 2km tall x 60m wide dust devil, 4km away and moving at about 19km/h was captured by #Perseverance on Sol 899. Its height was calculated by measuring the length of its shadow, in the manner of Thales of Miletus. 🤓
The gif in the post shows only the bottom 118m of it, but still, it's quite a spectacle as it traverses Thorofare Ridge from east to west.
New location for #Perseverance on Sol 926, after a 106m drive to the north: RMC 45.0760.
The faint cyan dashed line is my previously estimated route around sand ripples and rocks, based on a indicative route from a #Mars2020 team presentation at #MEPAG40.
And here is the estimated landing location of #Ingenuity's #Flight60. The straight part of the flight path is guessed, but the last part before landing, and the landing should be close to reality.
New location estimate for #Perseverance on Sol 909, RMC 44.4864. The rover ended up next to a small crater. The path is an educated guess, extracted from NAVCAM images.
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.
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:
Here is a visibility plot from #Perseverance's new location at RMC 44.4864.
Tosol, Sol 910, #Ingenuity's #Flight58 is expected to take place. With some luck, some part of it might even be captured by one of rover's cameras, as both takeoff and landing locations appear to be visible. The rover seems to have rushed to be at a suitable location. 😀
#Flight57 took place on Sunday, Sep 3 2023. The #MarsHelicopter chose to land at a place between two rocks, and apparently it managed it without hurting itself 😬
Apparently #NASA's #MMGIS map and mission log are already updated, but went unnoticed.
Also, my guessed alternative NW route (yellow stitched line) was not close to reality. The heli followed the planned WSW path, and apparently that's where #Perseverance will be heading next.
#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.
Back in the day, or sol, no one could have imagined that 13 months in the future, #Perseverance would still be together with #Ingenuity deep in the western Jezero hills, and that the #MarsHelicopter would have flown 54 flights and still going strong.
But the beautiful images provided by the #Mars2020 mission allow us to travel mentally in spacetime and see with our own eyes of then, tosol's reality. 😀
New location for #Perseverance on Sol 872, and new site, a couple of meters to the north: RMC 43.0000. Apparently those slabs in the ground in front of the rover are of interest to the geologists of the team 🙂
#Perseverance on its way to RMC 42.2700 made a stop to take a picture of its companion, #Ingenuity, at RMC 42.2360. The team apparently intended the image to be very detailed so they used MastcamZ with a focal length of 110mm from a distance of 14m!
This close up image will be useful in verifying that the yaw value in the JSON feed provided by #NASA's #MMGIS is indeed referenced to the same side of #Ingenuity's cubic body as the one the camera is mounted on. 🤓
So this question arises: if the plan for #Flight53 was to scout and cover 203m of ground, why did it do a straight line flight of only 142m? Even if this is a preliminary localization, still the flight seems rather abnormal.
@PaulHammond51
The yaw tells us which way the heli is looking, and I'd guess the cameras at yaw = 0° would be looking north; the tilt says how leveled it is. Very interesting stuff, if those data existed for each of the flight path points, then @stim3on's simulations would show the actual orientation of the heli during the flight.
We should thank @mapperwocky of #MMGIS for adding that data to the JSON file 👍 👍 !! What an amazing resource; those people make our wildest nerdy dreams come true!