Opportunity Sol 1075 (Spirit Sol 1096)

As Steve Squyres points out, "We're falling victim to the extraordinary scenery we see before us -- flash is extremely tight." And he's looking to make cuts, and of course, one of the cuts we end up making is to reduce the quality of the ultimate and penultimate drive images, just after Ashitey made a (justified) stink about it. Oh, well.

So we're driving, but it's not a big drive, just a few meters, to get into position to do another piece of our long-baseline imaging. But because of all the tricky sequencing now required to leave useful tracks for VO in this terrain, it ends up being quite a lengthy and complicated sequence.

So much so, indeed, that Steve can't resist tweaking us about it at the walkthrough. "This has gotta be the highest sequences-to-meters-driven ratio ever," he says. "This sequence is a work of art -- this has gotta be the fanciest three-meter drive I've ever seen. This is what happens when you give the rover planners one and a half hours to go three meters."

"Back at the beginning of the mission," he continues, "we'd have done this with a single three-meter arc."

"But then your stereo baseline wouldn't be as good," Terry points out.

"And we'd have fallen over the cliff, yeah," Steve replies. "But apart from that ...."