Ninety minutes later: Dumb in public, updates throughout…
If my interpretation of this map (bottom of page) is correct [it wasn’t] and the markings are kilometers, [they’re not] the Spirit and Opportunity rovers have landed about 130 km apart (80 miles) [on opposite sides of the planet].
The Rovers’ top driving speeds are reportedly 5 cm per second, which is about 0.18 km/h (0.11 mph) or 4.32 km/day (2.7 miles/day). If they were to drive towards one another, they could theoretically meet in a little more than two weeks [if they were 130 km apart, which they aren’t]. Only 487,000,000 kilometers[pdf] (303,000,000 miles) later.
Actually, NASA’s stated mobility goal is only 40 meters/day, and the top speed after various hazard-avoidance and navigation procedures is only 1 cm/second.
Spirit’s Gusev Crater appears to be within 50 km (31 miles) [on the same side of Mars as] of Olympus Mons, the tallest known volcano in our Solar System. I haven’t read anything about seeing the volcano in any of the Spirit Panoramas, possibly because the volcano is actually quite flat, 20 times wider than it is tall [or, possibly because it’s really quite far away].The hill I thought might have been Olympus Mons is simply labeled ‘Southwest Hill 215 Azimuth 7,5’, the wrong direction by my reading of the (unmarked) map. [at least I had a built-in excuse—sort of]
Of course if those aren’t kilometers, almost all of this is wrong [emphasis added].
Update: And they weren’t kilometers, and a lot of that was wrong. The map is actually a Mercator projection of Mars, all of Mars. The unmarked numbers are Martian latitude and longitude. I suppose claiming illiteracy about Martian geography isn’t the worst thing ever. Here are links to some Martian maps which could have prevented some embarrassing speculation:
As an aside, is geography really the right word? Being derived from the latin root geo, it seems a bit terrestrial. From a linguistic origin point of view, Astrogeology seems kind of linguistically muddled and contradictory. The word we should be using has evolved an altogether different meaning: Astrology.
