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June 2, 2005

Steady progress on both sides of the planet.

At Meridiani, we've picked up the tempo a little bit. On each of the last two sols we've commanded 20 meters worth of wheel turns, and on each we've seen about 12 cm worth of motion. That's encouraging; it's a rate of progress at or above anything we've seen so far. Perhaps more significantly, we're starting to see some changes in the geometry of the rover's suspension that suggest that we're making real progress over the crest of the ripple, which we were straddling back when all this started. The right rear wheel is starting to come up now with respect to other parts of the suspension, which means that the right middle wheel (which we can't see) has to be going down. And if the right middle wheel is going down, that probably means that it has crossed the crest of the ripple and is starting to go down the other side. I'm still not ready to guess when we'll be on our way again, but it's really heartening to see the kinds of changes that we knew we'd need to see before we could get free.

Over at Gusev, we've finished up our work on Larry's Lookout. In fact, we've only got a few odds and ends to tie off now before we leave this region for good. The most important of those will be to motor back toward Methuselah and get one more set of Pancam images there, aimed primarily at allowing us to make some fairly precise calculations of the orientation of the layering... what geologists call strike and dip. Once that's done, we'll be ready to leave the whole Lookout/Jibsheet/Methuselah region behind, and strike out toward new territory.