Opportunity Sol 855 (Spirit Sol 876)

We're continuing to make good progress toward Victoria. Close enough to taste it, or anyway smell it. Or maybe just hear it.

Anyway, we did 40m yestersol, and we'll do 40m again thisol. This one's a little weird; we're driving up onto a sort of curb. We see these once in a while -- abrupt little steps in the terrain, usually, as here, associated with rock.

Why do they happen? I don't know, I just drive over 'em.

But not without some paranoia. The curb is at the limit of our ability to precisely measure, so after some discussion, we end up loosening the suspension limits considerably for driving over the thing. It's not implausible that we'd pop a wheelie going over it -- this happens when one of the bogie wheels (usually the leading wheel) loses purchase but its partner keeps going, as can happen when you're driving over a feature like this. The suspension auto-corrects within a meter or two, and no harm done. We wouldn't want to cut the drive in half if that happened, so we effectively tell Opportunity to just ignore it if it does.

And once again, we're plodding toward Victoria.

[Next post: sol 878 (Opportunity sol 857), June 23.]