Opportunity Sol 1131 (Spirit Sol 1152)

We had a perfect bump to the rim yestersol, and we're now ready to take the first eye of our long-baseline stereo here. Then, later thisol, we'll creep 5m along the rim to the position where we'll take the other eye.

It's rare that we drive along the rim like this; mostly, we drive up to the rim, then back away slowly and reapproach somewhere else. I muse about this out loud to Sharon, who's able to put aside a little time to shadow today, and she has a great idea: let's make a movie!

We manage to sweet-talk the science team into this. It actually doesn't take a lot of effort -- they see the outreach potential as much as we do, and, hell, they think it's a cool idea themselves. (Larry Soderblom's response is, "Five megabits, on the scale of 600 megabits for the weekend? Sure!" He pauses for a second. "Uh, but let's stop it there." He's been doing this a long time, and is wise in the ways of the world.) So we set up to take images about every meter or so, and we're off.

Since these images have no particular science or engineering value, we prioritize them pretty low. They'll probably take weeks to come down, maybe a month or more. But when we get 'em, they'll be cool.

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Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech. Since Blogger doesn't seem to like animated GIFs, here's our rim-crawl animation from that sol. Awesome!