pulse Report This Comment Date: July 12, 2012 12:23PM
Click to expand a little, or look at the bottom of this post for the link to
the full res image:
This full-circle scene combines 817 images taken by the panoramic camera
(Pancam) on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. It shows the terrain that
surrounded the rover while it was stationary for four months of work during its
most recent Martian winter.
Opportunity's Pancam took the component images between the 2,811th Martian day,
or sol, of the rover's Mars surface mission (Dec. 21, 2011) and Sol 2,947 (May
8, 2012). Opportunity spent those months on a northward sloped outcrop,
"Greeley Haven," which angled the rover's solar panels toward the sun
low in the northern sky during southern hemisphere winter. The outcrop's
informal name is a tribute to Ronald Greeley (1939-2011), who was a member of
the mission team and who taught generations of planetary scientists at Arizona
State University, Tempe. The site is near the northern tip of the "Cape
York" segment of the western rim of Endeavour Crater.
North is at the center of the image. South is at both ends. On the far left at
the horizon is "Rich Morris Hill." That outcrop on Cape York was
informally named in memory of John R. "Rich" Morris (1973-2011), an
aerospace engineer and musician who was a Mars rover team member and mission
manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena.
Bright wind-blown deposits on the left are banked up against the Greeley Haven
outcrop. Opportunity's tracks can be seen extending from the south, with a
turn-in-place and other maneuvers evident from activities to position the rover
at Greeley Haven. The tracks in some locations have exposed darker underlying
soils by disturbing a thin, bright dust cover.
Other bright, dusty deposits can be seen to the north, northeast, and east of
Greeley Haven. The deposit at the center of the image, due north from the
rover's winter location, is a dusty patch called "North Pole."
Opportunity drove to it and investigated it in May 2012 as an example of
wind-blown Martian dust.
The interior of Endeavour Crater can been seen just below the horizon in the
right half of the scene, to the northeast and east of Cape York. The crater
spans 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter.
Opportunity's solar panels and other structures show dust that has accumulated
over the lifetime of the mission. Opportunity has been working on Mars since
January 2004.
During the recent four months that Opportunity worked at Greeley Haven,
activities included radio-science observations to better understand Martian spin
axis dynamics and thus interior structure, investigations of the composition and
textures of an outcrop exposing an impact-jumbled rock formation on the crater
rim, monitoring the atmosphere and surface for changes, and acquisition of this
full-color mosaic of the surroundings.
The panorama combines exposures taken through Pancam filters centered on
wavelengths of 753 nanometers (near infrared), 535 nanometers (green) and 432
nanometers (violet). The view is presented in false color to make some
differences between materials easier to see.
Photojournal Note: Also available are:
PIA15869.tif (Full-Res TIFF) and
PIA15869.jpg (Full-Res JPEG) These files may be too large to view
from a browser; they can be downloaded onto your desktop by right-clicking on
the previous links and viewed with image viewing software.
Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.
quasi Report This Comment Date: July 12, 2012 12:30PM
Are you sure that's not somewhere deep in Western Australia?
pulse Report This Comment Date: July 12, 2012 12:43PM
It's the same sound stage where the moon landing was filmed
