One part of the research program that NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is conducting while sitting at a favorable location for wintertime solar energy is the most detailed panorama yet taken on the surface of Mars. This view is a partial preliminary product from the continuing work on the full image, which will be called the "McMurdo Panorama."
Spirit's panoramic camera (Pancam) began taking exposures for the McMurdo Panorama on the rover's 814th Martian day (April 18, 2006). The rover has accumulated more than 900 exposures for this panorama so far, through all of the Pancam mineralogy filters and using little or no image compression. Even with a tilt toward the winter sun, the amount of energy available daily is small, so the job will still take one to two more months to complete.
This portion of the work in progress looks toward the north. "Husband Hill," which Spirit was climbing a year ago, is on the horizon near the center. "Home Plate" is a between that hill and the rover's current position. Wheel tracks imprinted when Spirit drove south from Home Plate can be seen crossing the middle distance of the image from the center to the right.
This is an approximate true-color rendering combining exposures taken through three of the panoramic camera's filters. The filters used are centered on wavelengths of 750 nanometers, 530 nanometers and 430 nanometers.
Click on the image for 'Burns Cliff' Color Panorama (QTVR)
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity captured this view of "Burns Cliff" after driving right to the base of this southeastern portion of the inner wall of "Endurance Crater." The view combines frames taken by Opportunity's panoramic camera between the rover's 287th and 294th martian days (Nov. 13 to 20, 2004).
This is a composite of 46 different images, each acquired in seven different Pancam filters. It is an approximately true-color rendering generated from the panoramic camera's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer filters. The mosaic spans more than 180 degrees side to side. Because of this wide-angle view, the cliff walls appear to bulge out toward the camera. In reality the walls form a gently curving, continuous surface.
The wheel tracks in this image are an artifact of the difficult terrain faced recently by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity deep inside "Endurance Crater." Opportunity took the picture with its navigation camera on the rover's 205th martian day, or sol (Aug. 21, 2004). On the preceding sol, to avoid a potentially hazardous rock target, the rover team changed routes. Steep slopes and lack of traction when driving in this terrain caused the rover to experience up to 50 percent slip during parts of its traverse. Opportunity ended up more than 50 centimeters (about 20 inches) downslope from the planned final position. Another shift in objective on sol 205 had Opportunity on the move again toward safer terrain. Analysis of the final drive showed the rover's traction increasing during its latest moves.
This image taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit shows a rock outcrop dubbed "Clovis." The rock was discovered to be softer than other rocks studied so far at Gusev Crater after the rover easily ground a hole (center) into it with its rock abrasion tool. An analysis of the interior of the hole with the rover's alpha particle X-ray spectrometer found higher concentrations of sulfur, bromine and chlorine compared to basaltic, or volcanic, rocks at Gusev. This might indicate that Clovis was chemically altered, and that fluids once flowed through the rock depositing these elements. Spirit's solar panels can be seen in the foreground. This image was taken by the rover's navigation camera on sol 205 (July 31, 2004).
The stack of fine layers exposed at a ledge called "Payson" on the western edge of "Erebus Crater" in Mars' Meridiani Planum shows a diverse range of primary and secondary sedimentary textures formed billions of years ago. These structures likely result from an interplay between windblown and water-involved processes.
The panoramic camera (Pancam) on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity acquired the exposures for this image on the rover's 749th Martian day (March 3, 2006) This view is an approximately true-color rendering mathematically generated from separate images taken through all of the left Pancam's 432-nanometer to 753-nanometer filters.
The intriguing dunes at the bottom of "Endurance Crater" presented a tantalizing target for the science team for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. After analyzing the soil near and around the dunes, however, the rover engineering team decided that it was too risky to send Opportunity any closer. The terrain between the rover and the dune tendril did not present clear evidence of rocky plates to give the rover sufficient traction. A finger-like dune tendril pictured here (left) is, essentially, pointing to the rover's current area of investigation. Opportunity rolled over the foreground rock, called "Puffin." During the past several sols the rover has been examining its new neighborhood, an area that includes the rocks "Ellesmere" and "Escher" (not pictured) and the soil targets "Shag" and "Auk" (also not pictured). Experiencing significant slippage, the rover did some unintended trenching and left deep tracks in this area. This view is a mosaic of two images taken by the rover's navigation camera on Opportunity's 206th sol on Mars (August 22, 2004) and presented in a perspective projection. Figure 1 is a cylindrical-perspective projection and Figure 2 is a cylindrical perspective.
Taking advantage of lengthening shadows during the onset of winter and at different times of day, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit acquired this series of images accentuating subtle features in the terrain. Images acquired at low sun angles allow scientists to better understand differences in surface roughness among soils and rocks. Variations in how brightly sunlight reflects off surfaces under different lighting conditions help scientists estimate the microscopic physical characteristics of the mineral grains in different rocks and soils.
Spirit acquired these sets of images at different local true solar times (LTST) on martian days, known as sols, 930 (Aug. 15, 2006), 931 (Aug. 16, 2006), and 935 (Aug. 20, 2006) using the 601-nanometer filter of the panoramic camera. Spirit acquired the single-frame images of sand ripples with the panoramic camera turned to an azimuth of 290 degrees (west-northwest).
Annotated Version
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The red line on this image traces the route that NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity drove from its landing inside Eagle Crater on Jan. 4, 2004 (Universal Time; Jan. 3 Pacific Standard Time) through the 1,742nd Martian day, or sol, of the mission (Dec. 17, 2008). During that period, Opportunity drove 13.62 kilometers (8.5 miles).
Opportunity climbed out of the 800-meter-wide (half-mile-wide) Victoria Crater on Sol 1634 (Aug. 28, 2008) after spending almost 12 months exploring the crater's interior and the preceding 12 months examining it from the rim. The rover's next major destination is a much larger crater further south, Endeavour Crater, with a diameter of about 22 kilometers (14 miles).
The route and labels on this map are overlain on a mosaic of images from the Mars Orbiter Camera on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment Camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Voir l'image PIA11737: Opportunity Sol 1742 Traverse Map sur le site de la NASA.
An outcrop dubbed "Methuselah," approached by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit in April 2005, presented a more extensive exposure of layered rock than Spirit had found in the all its preceding 15 months since landing on Mars. This view of Methuselah by Spirit's panoramic camera is presented in false color.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity captured this 360-degree panorama with its navigation camera on the rover's 354th martian day, or sol (Jan. 21, 2005). The view is presented as a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction. Just to the right of center is the divot where Opportunity's heat shield hit the ground after protecting the spacecraft during descent through Mars'atmosphere. The heat shield was jettisoned about 90 seconds before Opportunity landed about 800 meters (half a mile) away. To the left of the divot is the flank portion of the heat shield debris and in the left foreground is the main wreckage of the heat shield. On the far right is a basketball-size rock dubbed "Heat Shield Rock," which Opportunity's inspection identified as an iron-nickel meteorite. The rim of "Endurance Crater" is visible on the horizon on both the left and right ends of this full-circle view.
This image, taken by the panoramic camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit during the rover's trek through the "Columbia Hills" at "Gusev Crater," shows the horizontally layered rock dubbed "Tetl." Scientists hope to investigate this rock in more detail, aiming to determine whether the rock's layering is volcanic or sedimentary in origin. If for some reason this particular rock is not favorably positioned for grinding and examination by the toolbox of instruments on the rover's robotic arm, Spirit will be within short reach of another similar rock, dubbed "Coba." Spirit took this image on its 264th martian day, or sol (Sept. 29, 2004). This is a false-color composite image generated from the panoramic camera's 750-, 530-, and 430-nanometer filters.
This frame from the microscopic imager on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows spherules up to about 5 millimeters (one-fifth of an inch) in diameter. The camera took this image during the 924th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity's Mars-surface mission (Aug. 30, 2006), when the rover was about 200 meters (650 feet) north of 'Victoria Crater.'
Opportunity discovered spherules like these, nicknamed "blueberries," at its landing site in "Eagle Crater," and investigations determined them to be iron-rich concretions that formed inside deposits soaked with groundwater. However, such concretions were much smaller or absent at the ground surface along much of the rover's trek of more than 5 kilometers (3 miles) southward to Victoria. The big ones showed up again when Opportunity got to the ring, or annulus, of material excavated and thrown outward by the impact that created Victoria Crater. Researchers hypothesize that some layer beneath the surface in Victoria's vicinity was once soaked with water long enough to form the concretions, that the crater-forming impact dispersed some material from that layer, and that Opportunity might encounter that layer in place if the rover drives down into the crater.
This image taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows a target dubbed "Tuktoyuktuk" on a rock called "Inuvik" in "Endurance Crater." Opportunity dug a hole into the target with its rock abrasion tool, then captured this picture with its microscopic imager on sol 188 (Aug. 4, 2004). The image mosaic is about 6 centimeters (2.4 inches) across.
This mosaic of four frames from the microscopic imager on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit shows the texture of a target called "Davis" on a rock outcrop called "Jibsheet" on "Husband Hill" inside Mars' Gusev Crater. The images were taken on Spirit's 487th martian day, or "sol (May 17, 2005). The individual frames are each 3 centimeters (1.2 inches) across and they overlap slightly in this two-by-two array. The glossier central region of the mosaic, about 4.5 centimeters (1.8 inches) in diameter, was scrubbed with the wire-bristle brush of Spirit's rock abrasion tool. The scale of the images (31 microns or one one-thousandth of an inch per pixel) allows features as small as 0.1 millimeter (four one-thousandths of an inch) to be resolved. The image has been rotated 180 degrees
This mosaic from the navigation camera aboard NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity was compiled from images taken on the rover's 193rd and 194th sol on Mars (August 9 and 10, 2004). The rover's current work area near the bottom of "Endurance Crater" is featured in this image. In coming sols, Opportunity will make its way toward the interesting rock, "Wopmay," located on the far right of this image, on the crater's inner slopes just beneath "Burns Cliff." Scientists say the rock's unusual texture is unlike any others observed so far at Meridiani Planum. Wopmay measures approximately 1 meter (3.3 feet) across. This image is presented in cylindrical projection, with geometric and radiometric seam correction.
Figure 1 is the left-eye view of a stereo pair and Figure 2 is the right-eye view of a stereo pair.
Chemical Changes in 'Endurance' Rocks
This false-color image taken by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows a rock dubbed "Escher" on the southwestern slopes of "Endurance Crater." Scientists believe the rock's fractures, which divide the surface into polygons, may have been formed by one of several processes. They may have been caused by the impact that created Endurance Crater, or they might have arisen when water leftover from the rock's formation dried up. A third possibility is that much later, after the rock was formed, and after the crater was created, the rock became wet once again, then dried up and developed cracks. Opportunity has spent the last 14 sols investigating Escher, specifically the target dubbed "Kirchner," and other similar rocks with its scientific instruments. This image was taken on sol 208 (Aug. 24, 2004) by the rover's panoramic camera, using the 750-, 530- and 430-nanometer filters.
The graph above shows that rocks located deeper into "Endurance Crater" are chemically altered to a greater degree than rocks located higher up. This chemical alteration is believed to result from exposure to water.
Specifically, the graph compares ratios of chemicals between the deep rock dubbed "Escher," and the more shallow rock called "Virginia," before (red and blue lines) and after (green line) the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity drilled into the rocks. As the red and blue lines indicate, Escher's levels of chlorine relative to Virginia's went up, and sulfur down, before the rover dug a hole into the rocks. This implies that the surface of Escher has been chemically altered to a greater extent than the surface of Virginia. Scientists are still investigating the role water played in influencing this trend.
These data were taken by the rover's alpha particle X-ray spectrometer.
NASA's twin Mars Exploration Rovers have been getting smarter as they get older. This view from Opportunity shows the tracks left by a drive executed with more onboard autonomy than has been used on any other drive by a Mars rover.
Opportunity made the curving, 15.8-meter (52-foot) drive during its 1,160th Martian day, or sol (April 29, 2007). It was testing a navigational capability called "Field D-star," which enables the rover to plan optimal long-range drives around any obstacles in order to travel the most direct safe route to the drive's designated destination. Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, did not have this capability until the third year after their January 2004 landings on Mars. Earlier, they could recognize hazards when they approached them closely, then back away and try another angle, but could not always find a safe route away from hazards. Field D-Star and several other upgrades were part of new onboard software uploaded from Earth in 2006. The Sol 1,160 drive by Opportunity was a Martian field test of Field D-Star and also used several other features of autonomy, including visual odometry to track the rover's actual position after each segment of the drive, avoidance of designated keep-out zones, and combining information from two sets of stereo images to consider a wide swath of terrain in analyzing the route.
Two days later, on Sol 1,162, (May 1, 2007), Opportunity was still at the location it reached during that drive, and the rover's panoramic camera (Pancam) took the exposures combined into this image.
Victoria Crater is in the background, at the top of the image. The Sol 1,160 drive began at the place near the center of the image where tracks overlap each other. Tracks farther away were left by earlier drives nearer to the northern rim of the crater. For scale, the distance between the parallel tracks left by the rover's wheels is about 1 meter (39 inches) from the middle of one track to the middle of the other. The rocks in the center foreground are roughly 7 to 10 centimeters (3 to 4 inches) tall. The rover could actually drive over them easily, but for this test, settings in the onboard hazard-detection software were adjusted to make these smaller rocks be considered dangerous to the rover. The patch of larger rocks to the right was set as a keep-out zone. The location from which this image was taken is where the rover stopped driving to communicate with Earth. A straight line from the starting point to the destination would be 11 meters (36 feet). Opportunity plotted and followed a smoothly curved, efficient path around the rocks, always keeping the rover in safe areas.
This view combines separate images taken through the Pancam filters centered on wavelengths of 753 nanometers, 535 nanometers and 432 nanometers. It is presented in a false-color stretch to bring out subtle color differences in the scene.
Voir l'image PIA10212: D-Star Panorama by Opportunity (False Color) sur le site de la NASA.
As part of its investigation of "Victoria Crater," NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity examined a promontory called "Cape Verde" from the vantage point of "Cape St. Mary," the next promontory clockwise around the crater's deeply scalloped rim. This view of Cape Verde combines several exposures taken by the rover's panoramic camera into an approximately false-color mosaic. The exposures were taken during mid-afternoon lighting conditions.
The upper portion of the crater wall contains a jumble of material tossed outward by the impact that excavated the crater. This vertical cross-section through the blanket of ejected material surrounding the crater was exposed by erosion that expanded the crater outward from its original diameter, according to scientists' interpretation of the observations. Below the jumbled material in the upper part of the wall are layers that survive relatively intact from before the crater-causing impact.
The images combined into this mosaic were taken during the 1,006th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity's Mars-surface mission (Nov. 22, 2006). The panoramic camera took them through the camera's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer filters. The false color enhances subtle color differences among materials in the rocks and soils of the scene.
A promontory nicknamed "Cape Verde" can be seen jutting out from the walls of Victoria Crater in this approximate true-color picture taken by the panoramic camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. The rover took this picture on martian day, or sol, 1329 (Oct. 20, 2007), more than a month after it began descending down the crater walls -- and just 9 sols shy of its second Martian birthday on sol 1338 (Oct. 29, 2007). Opportunity landed on the Red Planet on Jan. 25, 2004. That's nearly four years ago on Earth, but only two on Mars because Mars takes longer to travel around the sun than Earth. One Martian year equals 687 Earth days.
The overall soft quality of the image, and the "haze" seen in the lower right portion, are the result of scattered light from dust on the front sapphire window of the rover's camera.
This view was taken using three panoramic-camera filters, admitting light with wavelengths centered at 750 nanometers (near infrared), 530 nanometers (green) and 430 nanometers (violet).
This 360-degree panorama shows the vista from the location where NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has spent its third Martian southern-hemisphere winter inside Mars' Gusev Crater. The rover's overwintering location is on the northern edge of a low plateau informally called "Home Plate," which is about 80 meters or 260 feet in diameter.
This view combines 246 different exposures taken with Spirit's panoramic camera (Pancam)—82 pointings, with three filters at each pointing. Spirit took the first of these frames during the mission's 1,477th Martian day, or sol, (February 28, 2008) two weeks after the rover made its last move to reach the location where it would stop driving for the winter. Solar energy at Gusev Crater is so limited during the Martian winter that Spirit does not generate enough electricity to drive, nor even enough to take many images per day. The last frame for this mosaic was taken on Sol 1691 (October 5, 2008). Spirit began moving again on Sol 1709 (October 23, 2008), inching uphill to adjust the angle of its solar panels for the last portion of the winter.
The hill on the horizon at far right is Husband Hill, to the north. Spirit acquired a 360-degree panorama (see PIA03610) from the summit of Husband Hill during August 2005). The hill dominating the left portion of the image is McCool Hill. Husband and McCool hills are two of the seven principal hills in the Columbia Hills range within Gusev Crater. Home Plate is in the inner basin of the range.
The northwestern edge of Home Plate is visible in the right foreground. The blockier, more sharply shadowed texture there is layered sandstone whose layering is tilted inward toward the edge of the Home Plate platform. The northeastern edge of Home Plate is visible in the left foreground. Spirit first climbed onto Home Plate on that region, in early 2006.
Rover tracks from driving by Spirit are visible on Home Plate in the center and right of the image. These were made during Spirit's second exploration on top of the plateau, which began when Spirit climbed onto the southern edge of Home Plate in September 2007.
In the center foreground, the turret of tools at the end of Spirit's robotic arm appears in duplicate because the arm was repositioned between the days when the images making up that part of the mosaic were taken. On the horizon above the turret, to the south, is a small hill capped with a light-toned outcrop. This hill is called "Von Braun," and it is a possible destination for Spirit during the upcoming Martian southern-hemisphere summer. The flat horizon in the right-hand portion of the panorama is the basaltic plain onto which Spirit landed on January 4, 2004 (Universal Time; January 3, 2004, Pacific Standard Time).
This is a false-color, red-green-blue composite panorama generated from images taken through the Pancam's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer filters. The false color enhances visibility of differences among the types of rock and soil material in the image.
Voir l'image PIA11745: Full-Circle 'Bonestell' Panorama from Spirit (False Color) sur le site de la NASA.
The rock in the center foreground of this picture is suspected of being an iron meteorite. The panoramic camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit took this image during the rover's 809th Martian day (April 12, 2006). The foreground rock, informally named "Allan Hills," and a similar rock called "Zhong Shan," just out of the field of view to the left, have a smoother texture and lighter tone than other rocks in the area.
The texture and glossiness of this pair reminded some members of the rover science team of a rock called "Heat Shield Rock," which was observed by Opportunity, Spirit's twin, in the Meridiani region of Mars more than a year ago. Examination of that rock's composition confirmed it to be an iron meteorite (see PIA07269).
Observations of Allan Hills and Zhong Shan with Spirit's miniature thermal emission spectrometer indicate that they are very reflective, like Heat Shield Rock. They are the first likely meteorites found by Spirit.
Rocks in the vicinity of Spirit's winter station are being assigned informal names honoring Antarctic research stations. Zhong Shan is an Antarctic base established by China in 1989. Allan Hills is a site where meteorites are frequently collected because they are relatively easy to see as dark rocks on the bright Antarctic ice. The most famous Allan Hills meteorite from Antarctica actually came from Mars and landed on Earth. If the Zhong Chang and Allan Hills rocks seen by Spirit do turn out to be iron-rich meteorites, they may have originated from an asteroid and landed on Mars.
This view is an approximately true-color rendering that combines images taken through the panoramic camera's 753-nanometer, 535-nanometer, and 432-nanometer filters. It is a portion of an image previously released (see PIA08095).
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its navigation camera to take the images combined into this 360-degree view of the rover's surroundings on the 1,687th Martian day, or sol, of its surface mission (Oct. 22, 2008).
Opportunity had driven 133 meters (436 feet) that sol, crossing sand ripples up to about 10 centimeters (4 inches) tall. The tracks visible in the foreground are in the east-northeast direction.
Opportunity's position on Sol 1687 was about 300 meters southwest of Victoria Crater. The rover was beginning a long trek toward a much larger crater, Endeavour, about 12 kilometers (7 miles) to the southeast.
This view is presented as a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
Voir l'image PIA11742: Opportunity's Surroundings on Sol 1687 sur le site de la NASA.
Gazing across the landscape of the "Columbia Hills" in Gusev Crater on Mars, scientists working with NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit think they have been seeing hints of tilted rock layers across the area traversed by the rover. At "Larry's Lookout," pictured here, ridges of rock are stacked atop each other and tilted. Similar rock ridges are visible in the distance across the "Tennessee Valley." One possible explanation for these ridges is that they were formed by tilted layers of sediment that were more resistant to erosion and now stand in relief above the surrounding surface. Scientists hope to better understand the structure of the hills and perhaps determine how they were formed by observing how the orientation of layers in these outcrops changes throughout the region. Hypotheses include that the Columbia Hills are the remains of an ancient volcano, a remnant of an old impact crater formed by an asteroid or comet, or delta deposits formed where water flowed into Gusev Crater early in its history. Each of these hypotheses leads to a different prediction regarding bedding orientation and structure.
Hills on the distant horizon may be the rim of a large impact crater many miles to the east of the Columbia Hills. Spirit took this image with its navigation camera on martian day, or sol, 438 (March 27, 2005).
Full-shade lighting in the late Martian afternoon helps make details visible in this view of the layered cliff face of the "Cape Verde" promontory making up part of the rim of Victoria Crater in the Meridiani Planum region of equatorial Mars.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its panoramic camera (Pancam) to shoot the dozens of individual images that have been combined into this mosaic. Opportunity was inside Victoria Crater and near the base of the cliff when it took these images on the 1,579th and 1,580th Martian days, or sols, of the mission (July 2 and 3, 2008).
Photographing the promontory from this position in Victoria Crater presented challenges for the rover team. The geometry was such that Cape Verde was between the rover and the sun, which could cause a range of negative effects, from glinting off Pancam's dusty lenses to shadowing on the cliff face. The team's solution was to take the images for this mosaic just after the sun disappeared behind the crater rim, at about 5:30 p.m. local solar time. The atmosphere was still lit, but no direct sunlight was illuminating the wall of Cape Verde.
The result is a high-resolution view of Cape Verde in relatively uniform diffuse sky lighting across the scene.
Pancam used a clear filter for taking the images for this mosaic. Capturing images in low-light situations was one of the main motivations for including the clear filter among the camera's assortment of filters available for use.
The face of Cape Verde is about 6 meters (20 feet) tall. Victoria Crater, at about 800 meters (one-half mile) wide, is the largest and deepest crater that Opportunity has visited. It sits more than 5 kilometers (almost 4 miles) away from Opportunity's Eagle Crater landing site. Researchers sent Opportunity into Victoria Crater to study the rock layers exposed inside. The textures seen in the rock layers of Cape Verde suggest that the exposed layers were originally deposited by wind.
Voir l'image PIA11048: Dusk Lighting of Layered Textures in 'Cape Verde' sur le site de la NASA.
Spirit Territory in Hills
Three outcrops near each other on the flank of "Husband Hill" inside Gusev Crater are labeled on this false-color view assembled from frames taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit's panoramic camera on the rover's 454th martian day, or sol (April 13, 2005).
Click on the image for
Of Craters and Erosion: Opportunity Examines "Beagle" (QTVR)
This 360-degree view shows Opportunity's last stop on the now-familiar surface of Meridiani Planum before reaching different terrains associated with the very large "Victoria Crater." In the center of the mosaic is "Beagle Crater," an impact crater about 35 meters (115 feet) wide. On the far left and wrapping around to the far right, Opportunity's tracks are visible approaching the crater.
Though it looks relatively fresh in orbital images, from a closer vantage point Beagle Crater appears moderately eroded. The crater walls are slumped and the middle of the crater bowl is filled with rippled sand. However, a slightly raised crater rim remains, and in a few places (for instance, on the inside left wall), cliffs of outcrop appear to be preserved in the crater. Ejected rocks from Beagle Crater surround the rover, many with the distinctive, fine-grained layering commonly seen in the rocks of Meridiani Planum. Many of these rocks have surfaces smoothed by wind erosion. Wind erosion also formed the sand drifts nestled among the rocks.
Because impact craters have well-understood shapes when they form, the altered appearance of eroded craters gives scientists clues to the processes that modified them. By observing how filled an impact crater has become and how worn its edges are, scientists can estimate how long its surface has been exposed to erosion. The many-sided outline of a crater such as Beagle and the blocky appearance of its ejecta may also tell scientists about the strength of the underlying bedrock. Based on observations such as these, scientists know that Beagle Crater is fresher than "Eagle" and "Fram" craters near Opportunity's landing site and more similar in form to "Viking" and "Voyager" craters in the plains to the north of Beagle.
Opportunity made other observations at Beagle Crater, such as spectroscopic measurements taken with the panoramic camera and the miniature thermal emission spectrometer, to help scientists assess the composition of the rocks and determine whether Beagle Crater was excavated into the surface rocks of Meridiani Planum or into the ejecta blanket of Victoria Crater.
Beagle Crater takes its unofficial name from a great ship of exploration, the HMS Beagle, whose most famous passenger was British naturalist Charles Darwin. During the Beagle expedition around the world, Darwin conducted many of the observations that led to his theory of natural selection. Scientists have unofficially named many rocks and features in the area of Beagle Crater after the Galapagos Islands and the varieties of finches Darwin observed there. The name Beagle Crater also commemorates the European Space Agency's ill-fated Beagle 2 lander, the loss if which is a reminder of how difficult space exploration can be.
Opportunity took the mosaic of images that make up this 360-degree view of the rover's surroundings with the panoramic camera on the rover's 901st through 904th sols, or Martian days (Aug. 6 through Aug. 9, 2006), of exploration. This is an approximate true-color image combining exposures taken through the panoramic camera's 753-nanometer, 535-namometer, and 432-nanometer filters.
Scientists viewed a rock like none seen before on Mars when NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit brushed the surface and took magnified images of this rock dubbed "Wishstone." The circular area of interest, measuring approximately 5 centimeters (2 inches) in diameter, revealed darker pieces of material randomly distributed within a lighter-colored matrix. The rock has poorly sorted granular material, with grain sizes ranging from fine to coarse and some grains that are very angular in shape.
Spirit used its microscopic imager on martian day, or sol, 333 (Dec. 9, 2004) to take the four individual frames that are combined into this mosaic view.
This view shows tracks created by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit while traveling from the bright soil deposit seen in the upper right, informally named "Tyrone," to the vehicle's current location, dubbed "Winter Haven."
Spirit parked at "Winter Haven" on a small north-facing slope to maximize solar energy input during the Martian winter. This stayover presents an opportunity to do more intensive, long-term investigations of the rover's surroundings than are typically possible during warmer seasons when the vehicle spends more time driving from place to place. One of these activities is assessing the influence of wind by monitoring surface changes. Experience from the Viking Landers of the 1970s suggests that wind-related surface changes are more likely to occur in recently disturbed soil.
Shortly after arriving at Winter Haven, Spirit obtained this high-resolution view of disturbed soil for comparison with future images to help reveal any wind-related surface changes. The view is a mosaic of images of the rover's tracks, obtained through the 750-nanomater filter in the left eye of Spirit's panoramic camera on the rover's 835th Martian day, or sol (May 9, 2006).
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity gained this view of its own heat shield during the rover's 325th martian day (Dec. 22, 2004). The main structure from the successfully used shield is to the far left. Additional fragments of the heat shield lie in the upper center of the image. The heat shield's impact mark is visible just above and to the right of the foreground shadow of Opportunity's camera mast. This view is a mosaic of three images taken with the rover's navigation camera.
This movie clip shows a dust devil scooting across a plain inside Gusev Crater on Mars as seen from the NASA rover Spirit's hillside vantage point during the rover's 456th martian day, or sol (April 15, 2005). The individual images were taken about 20 seconds apart by Spirit's navigation camera. Each frame in this movie has the raw image on the top half and a processed version in the lower half that enhances contrast and removes stationary objects, producing an image that is uniformly gray except for features that change from frame to frame.
The movie results from a new way of watching for dust devils, which are whirlwinds that hoist dust from the surface into the air. Spirit began seeing dust devils in isolated images in March 2005. At first, the rover team relied on luck. It might catch a dust devil in an image or it might miss by a few minutes. Using the new detection strategy, the rover takes a series of 21 images. Spirit sends a few of them to Earth, as well as little thumbnail images of all of them. Team members use the 3 big images and all the small images to decide whether the additional big images have dust devils. For this movie, they specifically told Spirit to send back frames that they knew had dust devils.
Scientists expected dust devils since before Spirit landed. The landing area inside Gusev Crater is filled with dark streaks left behind when dust devils pick dust up from an area. It is also filled with bright "hollows," which are dust-filled miniature craters. Dust covers most of the terrain. Winds flow into and out of Gusev crater every day. The Sun heats the surface so that the surface is warm to the touch even though the atmosphere at 2 meters (6 feet) above the surface would be chilly. That temperature contrast causes convection. Mixing the dust, winds, and convection should trigger dust devils.
Scientists will use the images to study several things. Tracking the dust devils tells which way the wind blows at different times of day. Statistics on the size of typical dust devils will help with estimates of how much dust they pump into the atmosphere every day. By watching individual dust devils change as they go over more-dusty and less-dusty terrain, researchers can learn about the turbulent motion near the surface. Ultimately, that motion of wind and dust near the surface relates these small dust devils with Mars' large dust storms.
Click on the image for movie of
Rovers Get New Driving Capability
Until recently, NASA's two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, could figure only one or two steps ahead in planning a path and driving on their own. New software uploaded to the rovers onboard computers now enables them to look ahead and plan a path to a spot 50 meters (164 feet) away, evading obstacles along the way. With this software, called "Field D-Star" path planner and developed at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, the rovers could find their way out of a maze.
Opportunity ran the first test of its smarter autonomous driving capability on the rover's 1,014th sol, or Martian day (Nov. 30, 2006). This overhead view shows the site of the test. The rover's software path (inside the blue box) is superimposed upon an image taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a portion of image PIA08813. Around the rover are the sands of Meridiani Planum; "Victoria Crater" is on the right. Red areas are "keep-out" zones established by human rover drivers to prevent Opportunity from getting too close to the edge of the crater. Green represents areas that would be safe to traverse based on stereo images taken by the rover's navigation cameras. The purple diamond represents Opportunity and the blue diamond the destination. The blue line is the most efficient path to the desired destination.
In the animation, the moving purple diamond represents Opportunity itself. White represents unknown areas.
During this particular 10.5-meter (34-foot) drive, Opportunity's new software was still only a backseat driver, watching what happened and making plans but letting the rest of the system handle the driving. The rover still relied on the one-step-ahead system it had been using before getting the new software. Future tests will put the software directly in the driver's seat. So far, tests have been successful.
Note: The size of the Full-Res TIFF for the still image is 2747 samples x 2747 lines.
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Of Craters and Erosion: Opportunity Examines "Beagle" (False Color)(QTVR)
This 360-degree view shows Opportunity's last stop on the now-familiar surface of Meridiani Planum before reaching different terrains associated with the very large "Victoria Crater." In the center of the mosaic is "Beagle Crater," an impact crater about 35 meters (115 feet) wide. On the far left and wrapping around to the far right, Opportunity's tracks are visible approaching the crater.
Though it looks relatively fresh in orbital images, from a closer vantage point Beagle Crater appears moderately eroded. The crater walls are slumped and the middle of the crater bowl is filled with rippled sand. However, a slightly raised crater rim remains, and in a few places (for instance, on the inside left wall), cliffs of outcrop appear to be preserved in the crater. Ejected rocks from Beagle Crater surround the rover, many with the distinctive, fine-grained layering commonly seen in the rocks of Meridiani Planum. Many of these rocks have surfaces smoothed by wind erosion. Wind erosion also formed the sand drifts nestled among the rocks.
Because impact craters have well-understood shapes when they form, the altered appearance of eroded craters gives scientists clues to the processes that modified them. By observing how filled an impact crater has become and how worn its edges are, scientists can estimate how long its surface has been exposed to erosion. The many-sided outline of a crater such as Beagle and the blocky appearance of its ejecta may also tell scientists about the strength of the underlying bedrock. Based on observations such as these, scientists know that Beagle Crater is fresher than "Eagle" and "Fram" craters near Opportunity's landing site and more similar in form to "Viking" and "Voyager" craters in the plains to the north of Beagle.
Opportunity made other observations at Beagle Crater, such as spectroscopic measurements taken with the panoramic camera and the miniature thermal emission spectrometer, to help scientists assess the composition of the rocks and determine whether Beagle Crater was excavated into the surface rocks of Meridiani Planum or into the ejecta blanket of Victoria Crater.
Beagle Crater takes its unofficial name from a great ship of exploration, the HMS Beagle, whose most famous passenger was British naturalist Charles Darwin. During the Beagle expedition around the world, Darwin conducted many of the observations that led to his theory of natural selection. Scientists have unofficially named many rocks and features in the area of Beagle Crater after the Galapagos Islands and the varieties of finches Darwin observed there. The name Beagle Crater also commemorates the European Space Agency's ill-fated Beagle 2 lander, the loss if which is a reminder of how difficult space exploration can be.
Opportunity took the mosaic of images that make up this 360-degree view of the rover's surroundings with the panoramic camera on the rover's 901st through 904th sols, or Martian days (Aug. 6 through Aug. 9, 2006), of exploration. This is a false-color image using exposures taken through the panoramic camera's 753-nanometer, 535-namometer, and 432-nanometer filters. The false color emphasizes differences in rock and soil materials.
Voir l'image PIA10229: 'Lyell' Panorama inside Victoria Crater (False Color) sur le site de la NASA.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity caught this view of the main piece of the spacecraft's heat shield during the rover's 328th martian day, or sol (Dec. 25, 2004). A separation spring can be seen on the ground to the lower left side of the heat shield.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its navigation camera to take the images combined into this 360-degree view of the rover's surroundings on the 397th martian day, or sol, of its surface mission (March 6, 2005). Opportunity had completed a drive of 124 meters (407 feet) across the rippled flatland of the Meridiani Planum region on the previous sol, but did not drive on this sol. This location is catalogued as Opportunity's site 48. The view is presented here as a cylindrical projection with geometric and brightness seam correction.
As part of its investigation of "Victoria Crater," NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity examined a promontory called "Cape St. Mary" from the from the vantage point of "Cape Verde," the next promontory counterclockwise around the crater's deeply scalloped rim. This view of Cape St. Mary combines several exposures taken by the rover's panoramic camera into a false-color mosaic. Contrast has been adjusted to improve the visibility of details in shaded areas.
The upper portion of the crater wall contains a jumble of material tossed outward by the impact that excavated the crater. This vertical cross-section through the blanket of ejected material surrounding the crater was exposed by erosion that expanded the crater outward from its original diameter, according to scientists' interpretation of the observations. Below the jumbled material in the upper part of the wall are layers that survive relatively intact from before the crater-causing impact. Near the base of the Cape St. Mary cliff are layers with a pattern called "crossbedding," intersecting with each other at angles, rather than parallel to each other. Large-scale crossbedding can result from material being deposited as wind-blown dunes.
The images combined into this mosaic were taken during the 970th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity's Mars-surface mission (Oct. 16, 2006). The panoramic camera took them through the camera's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer filters. The false color enhances subtle color differences among materials in the rocks and soils of the scene.
This three-dimensional view from the navigation camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows an unusual, lumpy rock informally named "Wopmay" on the lower slopes of "Endurance Crater." Opportunity took the frames that make up this image on the rover's 250th martian day, or sol, on Oct. 6, 2004. Later, Opportunity investigated the rock with instruments on its robotic arm.
The rock's informal name refers to Wilfrid Reid "Wop" May, a Canadian bush pilot. Scientists believe that the lumps in Wopmay, like traits of "Escher" and other rocks dotting the bottom of Endurance Crater, may be related to cracking and alteration processes, possibly caused by exposure to water. The area between intersecting sets of cracks appears to have eroded in a way that shaped the lumpy appearance. Wopmay measures approximately 1 meter (3.3 feet) across.
Voir l'image PIA06949: Wonderful Wopmay sur le site de la NASA.
This movie clip shows a several dust devils -- whirlwinds that loft dust into the air -- moving across a plain below the hillside vantage point of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. Several of the dust devils are visible at once in some of the frames in this sequence. The local solar time was about 2 p.m., when the ground temperature was high enough to cause turbulence that kicks up dust devils as the wind blows across the plain. The number of seconds elapsed since the first frame is indicated at lower left of the images, typically 20 seconds between frames. Spirit's navigation camera took these images on the rover's 463rd martian day, or sol (April 22, 2005.) Contrast has been enhanced for anything in the images that changes from frame to frame, that is, for the dust devil.
Scientists expected dust devils since before Spirit landed. The landing area inside Gusev Crater is filled with dark streaks left behind when dust devils pick dust up from an area. It is also filled with bright "hollows," which are dust-filled miniature craters. Dust covers most of the terrain. Winds flow into and out of Gusev crater every day. The Sun heats the surface so that the surface is warm to the touch even though the atmosphere at 2 meters (6 feet) above the surface would be chilly. That temperature contrast causes convection. Mixing the dust, winds, and convection can trigger dust devils.
The 10 frames, taken 32 seconds apart, show the formation and evolution of what are likely mid-level, convective water clouds. Such clouds are common near Mars' equator at this time of the Martian year. They have been observed by both of NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers, by satellites orbiting Mars, and by the Hubble Space Telescope. In this case, the clouds appear to develop at a fixed location, in the center of the frame about 25 degrees above the horizon. This style of origin suggests that a thermal plume is rising over a surface feature. In spite of apparent winds aloft, the thermal plume appears to remain stationary for the 5-minute duration of the movie.
Though scientists have determined from the images that the wind bearing is east-northeast, approximately 80 degrees, it is not possible on the basis of the movie to unambiguously determine the height and speed of the clouds. Scientists estimate, based on models of atmospheric wind profiles and the apparent displacement of the clouds, that all of the clouds in the movie are at about the same height somewhere between 5 kilometers and 25 kilometers (3 to 20 miles) above the surface. The clouds are estimated to be moving at 2.5 meters per second, if they are low, to 12.5 meters per second, if they are high (8 feet per second to 41 feet per second).
Like clouds on Earth, these Martian clouds are probably composed of ice crystals and possibly supercooled water droplets. They are similar in appearance to terrestrial cirrocumulus or high altocumulus clouds. On Earth, such clouds are relatively transient and consist of small, individual cloudlets arranged in rippled patterns. They usually form 6 kilometers to 12 kilometers (4 to 7 miles) above Earth's surface by a process known as convection, during which warm air rises and cools, with clouds condensing from the moist air once it has cooled sufficiently.
These Martian clouds appear to be associated with a broader layer of ice-crystal clouds fanning out toward the upper right of the frames at the end of the movie. This is similar to the occurrence of terrestrial cirrocumulus and altocumulus clouds within layers of cirrus or cirrostratus clouds on Earth. Also apparent in this movie are prominent waves in the clouds, a result of the effect of gravity waves on cloud thickness, as on Earth.
Though both rovers now have the ability to autonomously detect clouds, these images were taken prior to the first use of the new abilities. The images shown here were stored on Opportunity and were transmitted to Earth on sol 1056 (Jan. 12, 2007) during a routine communications pass.
This image from the panoramic camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows remains of the heat shield that protected the spacecraft as it barreled through the martian atmosphere. The image was taken on the rover's 325th martian day, or sol, (Dec. 22, 2004).
The picture features the main heat shield debris when Opportunity was approximately 40 meters (about 131 feet) away from it. Many rover-team engineers were taken aback when they realized the heat shield had inverted, or turned itself inside out. The height of the pictured debris is about 1.3 meters (about 4.3 feet). The original diameter was 2.65 meters (8.7 feet), though it has obviously been deformed.
The fact that the heat shield is now inside out makes it more challenging to evaluate the state of the thermal protection system that is now on the inside. In coming sols, Opportunity will investigate the debris with its microscopic imager.
Engineers who designed and built the heat shield are thrilled to see the hardware on the surface of Mars. This provides a unique opportunity to look at how the thermal protection system material survived the actual Mars entry. Team members hope this information will allow them to compare their predictions to what really happened.
The image is an approximately true-color rendering generated using the panoramic camera's 600, 530 and 480 nanometer filters.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its front hazard-identification camera to obtain this image at the end of a drive on the rover's 1,271st sol, or Martian day (Aug. 21, 2007).
Due to sun-obscuring dust storms limiting the rover's supply of solar energy, Opportunity had not driven since sol 1,232 (July 12, 2007). On sol 1,271, after the sky above Opportunity had been gradually clearing for more than two weeks, the rover rolled 13.38 meters (44 feet). Wheel tracks are visible in front of the rover because the drive ended with a short test of driving backwards.
Opportunity's turret of four tools at the end of the robotic arm fills the center of the image. Victoria Crater, site of the rover's next science targets, lies ahead.
On sol 1120 (February 26, 2007), the navigation camera aboard NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured one of the best dust devils it's seen in its three-plus year mission. The series of navigation camera images were put together to make a dust devil movie.
The dust devil column is clearly defined and is clearly bent in the down wind direction. Near the end of the movie, the base of the dust devil becomes much wider. The atmospheric science team thinks that this is because the dust devil encountered some sand and therefore produced a "saltation skirt," an apron of material that is thrown out of the dust devil because it is too large to be carried up into suspension.
Also near the end of the movie the dust devil seems to move faster across the surface. This is because Spirit began taking pictures less frequently, and not because the dust devil sped up.
This image from the panoramic camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity features the remains of the heat shield that protected the rover from temperatures of up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit as it made its way through the martian atmosphere. This two-frame mosaic was taken on the rover's 335th martian day, or sol, (Jan. 2, 2004).
The view is of the main heat shield debris seen from approximately 10 meters (about 33 feet) away from it. Many rover-team engineers were taken aback when they realized the heat shield had inverted, or turned itself inside out. The height of the pictured debris is about 1.3 meters (about 4.3 feet). The original diameter was 2.65 meters (8.7 feet), though it has obviously been deformed. The Sun reflecting off of the aluminum structure accounts for the vertical blurs in the picture.
The fact that the heat shield is now inside out makes it more challenging to evaluate the state of the thermal protection system that is now on the inside. In coming sols, Opportunity will investigate the debris with its microscopic imager.
Engineers who designed and built the heat shield are thrilled to see the hardware on the surface of Mars. This provides a unique opportunity to look at how the thermal protection system material survived the actual Mars entry. Team members hope this information will allow them to compare their predictions to what really happened.
The image is an approximately true-color rendering generated using the panoramic camera's 600, 530 and 480 nanometer filters.
This view from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows bedrock within a stratigraphic layer informally named "Lyell," which is the lowermost of three layers the rover has examined at a bright band around the inside of Victoria Crater.
Opportunity used its panoramic camera (Pancam) to capture this image with low-sun angle at a local solar time of 3:21 p.m. during the rover's 1,433rd Martian day, of sol (Feb. 4, 2008).
This view combines separate images taken through the Pancam filters centered on wavelengths of 753 nanometers, 535 nanometers and 432 nanometers. It is presented in a false-color stretch to bring out subtle color differences in the scene.
Voir l'image PIA10238: Opportunity View of 'Lyell' Layer (False Color) sur le site de la NASA.
As part of its investigation of "Victoria Crater," NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity examined a promontory called "Cape St. Mary" from the from the vantage point of "Cape Verde," the next promontory counterclockwise around the crater's deeply scalloped rim. This view of Cape St. Mary combines several exposures taken by the rover's panoramic camera into an approximately true-color mosaic.
The upper portion of the crater wall contains a jumble of material tossed outward by the impact that excavated the crater. This vertical cross-section through the blanket of ejected material surrounding the crater was exposed by erosion that expanded the crater outward from its original diameter, according to scientists' interpretation of the observations. Below the jumbled material in the upper part of the wall are layers that survive relatively intact from before the crater-causing impact. Near the base of the Cape St. Mary cliff are layers with a pattern called "crossbedding," intersecting with each other at angles, rather than parallel to each other. Large-scale crossbedding can result from material being deposited as wind-blown dunes.
The images combined into this mosaic were taken during the 970th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity's Mars-surface mission (Oct. 16, 2006). The panoramic camera took them through the camera's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer filters.
NASA's Mars Exploration Spirit examined a rock dubbed "Uchben" in the "Columbia Hills" inside Gusev Crater. Spirit took this image with its panoramic camera as it approached the rock during the rover's 278th martian day (Oct. 14, 2004). The visible portion of Uchben is about 50 centimenters (20 inches) long.
Abrasion Work on 'Uchben' (Figure 1)
Researchers used the rover Spirit's rock abrasion tool to help them study a rock dubbed "Uchben" in the "Columbia Hills" of Mars. The tool ground into the rock, creating a shallow hole 4.5 centimeters (1.8 inches) in diameter in the central upper portion of this image. It also used wire bristles to brush a portion of the surface below and to the right of the hole. Spirit used its panoramic camera during the rover's 293rd martian day (Oct. 29, 2004) to take the frames combined into this approximately true-color image.
NASA Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its front hazard-identification camera to capture this wide-angle view of its robotic arm extended to a rock in a bright-toned layer inside Victoria Crater.
The image was taken during the rover's 1,322nd Martian day, or sol (Oct. 13, 2007).
Victoria Crater has a scalloped shape of alternating alcoves and promontories around the crater's circumference. Opportunity descended into the crater two weeks earlier, within an alcove called "Duck Bay." Counterclockwise around the rim, just to the right of the arm in this image, is a promontory called "Cabo Frio."
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has found a patch of bright-toned soil so rich in silica that scientists propose water must have been involved in concentrating it.
The silica-rich patch, informally named "Gertrude Weise" after a player in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, was exposed when Spirit drove over it during the 1,150th Martian day, or sol, of Spirit's Mars surface mission (March 29, 2007). One of Spirit's six wheels no longer rotates, so it leaves a deep track as it drags through soil. Most patches of disturbed, bright soil that Spirit had investigated previously are rich in sulfur, but this one has very little sulfur and is about 90 percent silica.
This image is a approximately true-color composite of three images taken through different filters by Spirit's panoramic camera on Sol 1,187 (May 6). The track of disturbed soil is roughly 20 centimeters (8 inches) wide.
Spirit's miniature thermal emission spectrometer, which can assess a target's mineral composition from a distance, examined the Gertrude Weise patch on Sol 1,172 (April 20). The indications it found for silica in the overturned soil prompted a decision to drive Spirit close enough to touch the soil with the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, a chemical analyzer at the end of Spirit's robotic arm. The alpha particle X-ray spectrometer collected data about this target on sols 1,189 and 1,190 (May 8 and May 9) and produced the finding of approximately 90 percent silica.
Silica is silicon dioxide. On Earth, it commonly occurs as the crystalline mineral quartz and is the main ingredient in window glass. The Martian silica at Gertrude Weise is non-crystalline, with no detectable quartz.
In most cases, water is required to produce such a concentrated deposit of silica, according to members of the rover science team. One possible origin for the silica could have been interaction of soil with acidic steam produced by volcanic activity. Another could have been from water in a hot spring environment.
From its winter outpost at "Low Ridge" inside Gusev Crater, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit took this spectacular, color mosaic of hilly, sandy terrain and two potential iron meteorites. The two light-colored, smooth rocks about two-thirds of the way up from the bottom of the frame have been labeled "Zhong Shan" and "Allan Hills."
The two rocks' informal names are in keeping with the rover science team's campaign to nickname rocks and soils in the area after locations in Antarctica. Zhong Shang is an Antarctic base that the People's Republic of China opened on Feb. 26, 1989, at the Larsemann Hills in Prydz Bay in East Antarctica. Allan Hills is a location where researchers have found many Martian meteorites, including the controversial ALH84001, which achieved fame in 1996 when NASA scientists suggested that it might contain evidence for fossilized extraterrestrial life. Zhong Shan was the given name of Dr. Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), known as the "Father of Modern China." Born to a peasant family in Guangdong, Sun moved to live with his brother in Honolulu at age 13 and later became a medical doctor. He led a series of uprisings against the Qing dynasty that began in 1894 and eventually succeeded in 1911. Sun served as the first provisional president when the Republic of China was founded in 1912.
The Zhong Shan and Allan Hills rocks, at the left and right, respectively, have unusual morphologies and miniature thermal emission spectrometer signatures that resemble those of a rock known as "Heat Shield" at the Meridiani site explored by Spirit's twin, Opportunity. Opportunity's analyses revealed Heat Shield to be an iron meteorite.
Spirit acquired this approximately true-color image on the rover's 872nd Martian day, or sol (June 16, 2006), using exposures taken through three of the panoramic camera's filters, centered on wavelengths of 600 nanometers, 530 nanometers, and 480 nanometers.
This image from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity highlights the seal on the rover's protective heat shield. Engineers evaluated the performance of the protective shell's seal during a 36-sol investigation.
After viewing these images, engineers were pleased with how the seal performed.
This is an approximately true-color rendering of the scene acquired around 1:07 p.m. local solar time on Opportunity's sol 339 (Jan. 6, 2005) in an image mosaic using panoramic camera filters at wavelengths of 750, 530, and 430 nanometers.
A rock dubbed "Palenque" in the "Columbia Hills" of Mars has contrasting textures in upper and lower portions. This view of the rock combines two frames taken by the panoramic camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit during the rover's 278th martian day (Oct. 14, 2004). The layers meet each other at an angular unconformity that may mark a change in environmental conditions between the formation of the two portions of the rock. Scientists would have liked the rover to take a closer look, but Palenque is not on a north-tilted slope, which is the type of terrain needed to keep the rover's solar panels tilted toward the winter sun. The exposed portion of the rock is about 100 centimeters (39 inches) long.
Voir l'image PIA07019: 'Palenque' Rock: Tempting Target, Poor Location sur le site de la NASA.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its navigation camera for this view of the flank piece of the spacecraft's heat shield on the rover's 332nd martian day, or sol (Dec. 29, 2004). The team that designed the descent and landing systems for the rovers is trying to characterize heat-shield performance by examining the wreckage of Opportunity's heat shield.
The left front wheel of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity makes slow but steady progress through soft dune material in this movie clip of frames taken by the rover's front hazard identification camera over a period of several days. The sequence starts on Opportunity's 460th martian day, or sol (May 10, 2005) and ends 11 days later. In eight drives during that period, Opportunity advanced a total of 26 centimeters (10 inches) while spinning its wheels enough to have driven 46 meters (151 feet) if there were no slippage. The motion appears to speed up near the end of the clip, but that is an artifact of individual frames being taken less frequently.
This 360-degree panorama of a section of the "Columbia Hills" shows meandering, crisscrossing wheel tracks that NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit left behind while using its scientific instruments to analyze a new class of rocks in Gusev Crater on Mars. Because Spirit has been experiencing a high rate of slip on the sandy, sloped terrain on this flank of "Husband Hill," scientists are directing the rover to check its progress often to avoid getting a rock stuck in one of its wheel wells.
Rocks in this region are higher in phosphorus than other rocks that Spirit has examined.
This view is a mosaic of frames that Spirit took with its navigation camera during the rover's 358th and 359th martian days, or sols, (Jan. 3 and 4, 2005). It is presented here in a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit was crossing northward on a low plateau called "Home Plate" on the 1,386th Martian day, or sol, (Nov. 26, 2007) of Spirit's time on Mars. By that time, nearly 47 months into a mission originally planned to last three months, Spirit had driven 7,435 meters (4.62 miles). From its landing site near the northwest corner of this map, Spirit crossed a plain to reach the Columbia Hills, climbed over the summit of Husband Hill, and descended into the "Inner Basin" of the range, near the southeast corner of the map.
For this map, the yellow line indicating Spirit's route has been overlaid onto a portion of an image taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Nov. 22, 2006, That image is catalogued as PSP_001513_1655 (see also PIA01897). The scale bar on the map is 500 meters (1,640 feet) long. North is up.
Voir l'image PIA10126: Spirit's Traverse, Sols 1 to 1,386 sur le site de la NASA.
The grinding teeth have worn away on the rock abrasion tool of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit (after exposing interiors of five time more rock targets than its design goal of three rocks) but the tool still has useful wire bristles for brushing targets. In this image, a figure-eight-like imprint in the Martian soil marks the spot where Spirit has begun examining subsurface deposits layer by layer. The circular indentations resulted from brushing by the rock abrasion tool, one of several instruments on the rover's robotic arm. As an effective brushing tool it is now fulfilling a soil profiling experiment on a target called "Progress."
The experiment is a multi-step process of carefully brushing away fine layers of soil and then using the Moessbauer and alpha particle X-ray spectrometers, microscopic imager, and panoramic camera to examine the exposed surfaces during the long Martian winter.
This view is a mosaic of exposures taken by Spirit's microscopic imager during the rover's 830th Martian day (May 4, 2006). The total area shown is about 6 centimeters (2.4 inches) square.
The right front wheel of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity makes slow but steady progress through soft dune material in this movie clip of frames taken by the rover's front hazard identification camera over a period of several days. The sequence starts on Opportunity's 460th martian day, or sol (May 10, 2005) and ends 11 days later. In eight drives during that period, Opportunity advanced a total of 26 centimeters (10 inches) while spinning its wheels enough to have driven 46 meters (151 feet) if there were no slippage. The motion appears to speed up near the end of the clip, but that is an artifact of individual frames being taken less frequently.
This image from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity features an up-close view of the flank piece of the rover's broken heat shield.
The rover spent 36 sols investigating how the severe heating during entry through the atmosphere affected the heat shield. The most obvious is the fact that the heat shield inverted upon impact. Overall, engineers were interested in evaluating the performance of the heat shield's thermal protection system.
This is the the panormamic camera team's best current attempt at generating a "true color" view of what this scene would look like if viewed by a human on Mars. It was generated from a mathematical combination of six calibrated, left-eye panoramic camera images acquired around 3:07 p.m. local solar time on Opportunity's sol 331 (Dec. 28, 2004) using filters ranging in wavelengths from 430 to 750 nanometers.
Like a circular ripple intersecting a flowing stream, the tracks created by NASA's Spirit rover are reminiscent of a Zen rock garden. Highly prized in Japan, such gardens use rocks and raked gravel to suggest entire landscapes of islands, seas, and streams. A centuries-old Buddhist and Taoist tradition, the creation and contemplation of rock gardens serves to reduce the complexity of life and allow the individual to develop inner calm, though whether or not Spirit is developing robotic inner calm may be open to speculation.
Spirit took this mosaic of images with the navigation camera on martian day, or sol, 476 (May 5, 2005), at the end of a drive. Spirit previously had to abandon climbing hills on Sol 455 (April 14, 2005) because of steep slopes. The backtracking was fortuitous, allowing the science team to discover layered outcrops of rock that had been overlooked on the first drive past this area. Since then, Spirit has been examining those "Methuselah" outcrops in the "Columbia Hills" for several weeks. This mosaic looks back at the tracks Spirit left while backtracking and heading to "Methuselah."
This 360-degree panorama shows the vista from the location where NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity spent five weeks in November and December 2008 while the sun was nearly directly in between Mars and Earth, limiting communications.
Opportunity is approaching the fifth Earth-year anniversary of its landing on Mars, continuing a surface mission that was initially scheduled to last three months. The rover landed on Jan. 24, 2004 (Pacific Standard Time; Jan. 25, 2004 Universal Time). When it reached the location from which its panoramic camera (Pancam) captured this view, it had driven a total of 13,616 meters (8.46 miles) since its landing.
The view combines 276 different exposures taken with Opportunity's panoramic camera (Pancam)—92 pointings, with three filters at each pointing. The component images were taken during the period from the rover's 1,716th Martian day, or sol, to the mission's Sol 1719 (Nov. 21 to 24, 2008).
Opportunity has driven 1.83 kilometers (1.14 miles) since it exited Victoria Crater on Sol 1634 (Aug. 28, 2008). It skirted the west rim of Victoria and, at the point from which this panorama was taken, had reached a position about a kilometer (six-tenths of a mile) southwest of the south rim of the crater.
North is in the center of the panorama. Rover tracks are visible from the drive to the location from which the Pancam captured this view. For scale, the distance between the parallel wheel tracks is about one meter (3 feet).
Opportunity is on a 12-kilometer (7-mile) trek toward Endeavour crater (see PIA11737) a crater more than 20 times the size of Victoria Crater, which Opportunity studied for about two years. On the way toward Endeavour the rover is pausing to examine selected loose rocks on the surface. At the location from which this panorama was taken, the rover used the spectrometers on its robotic arm to examine a cobble informally called "Santorini," a dark rock about 8 centimeters (3 inches) long, which the inspection indicates is probably a meteorite. The rock is too close to the rover to be visible in this panorama.
The lighter-toned patches of ground in this view are sulfate-rich bedrock. Darker patches are dark, windblown sand. The metal post in the foreground is the top of Opportunity's low-gain antenna.
Opportunity began driving again on Sol 1748 (Dec. 23, 2008).
This is a false-color, red-green-blue composite panorama generated from images taken through the Pancam's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer filters. The false color enhances visibility of differences among the types of rock and soil material in the image.
Voir l'image PIA11753: Full-Circle "Santorini" Panorama from Opportunity (False Color) sur le site de la NASA.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity entered Victoria Crater during the rover's 1,291st Martian day, or sol, (Sept. 11, 2007). The rover team commanded Opportunity to drive just far enough into the crater to get all six wheels onto the inner slope, and then to back out again and assess how much the wheels slipped on the slope. The driving commands for the day included a precaution for the rover to stop driving if the wheels were slipping more than 40 percent. Slippage exceeded that amount on the last step of the drive, so Opportunity stopped with its front pair of wheels still inside the crater. The rover team planned to assess results of the drive, then start Opportunity on an extended exploration inside the crater.
This wide-angle view taken by Opportunity's front hazard-identification camera at the end of the day's driving shows the wheel tracks created by the short dip into the crater. The left half of the image looks across an alcove informally named "Duck Bay" toward a promontory called "Cape Verde" clockwise around the crater wall. The right half of the image looks across the main body of the crater, which is 800 meters (half a mile) in diameter.
This image shows the site where NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity will carefully roll down into Victoria Crater on Mars. This particular alcove, nicknamed "Duck Bay," has gradual slopes of about 15 to 20 degrees and exposed bedrock, making it the safest place for the rover to enter the crater. Rover drivers plan to avoid a rippled portion of terrain near the rim of the crater, and to steer Opportunity down the smoothest bedrock with the gentlest slopes.
This enhanced-color view was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft on Oct. 3, 2006. This image was previously released (see PIA08812).
This image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity near the rim of "Victoria crater." Victoria is an impact crater about 800 meters (half a mile) in diameter at Meridiani Planum near the equator of Mars. Opportunity has been operating on Mars since January, 2004. Five days before this image was taken, Opportunity arrived at the rim of Victoria crater, after a drive of more than 9 kilometers (over 5 miles). It then drove to the position where it is seen in this image.
Shown in the image are "Duck Bay," the eroded segment of the crater rim where Opportunity first arrived at the crater; "Cabo Frio," a sharp promontory to the south of Duck Bay; and "Cape Verde," another promontory to the north. When viewed at the highest resolution, this image shows the rover itself, wheel tracks in the soil behind it, and the rover's shadow, including the shadow of the camera mast. Since this image was taken, Opportunity has moved to the very tip of Cape Verde to perform more imaging of the interior of the crater.
This view is a portion of an image taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft on Oct. 3, 2006. The complete image is centered at minus7.8 degrees latitude, 279.5 degrees East longitude. The range to the target site was 297 kilometers (185.6 miles). At this distance the image scale is 29.7 centimeters (12 inches) per pixel (with 1 x 1 binning) so objects about 89 centimeters (35 inches) across are resolved. The image shown here has been map-projected to 25 centimeters (10 inches) per pixel and north is up. The image was taken at a local Mars time of 3:30 PM and the scene is illuminated from the west with a solar incidence angle of 59.7 degrees, thus the sun was about 30.3 degrees above the horizon. At a solar longitude of 113.6 degrees, the season on Mars is northern summer.
This is an enhanced-color view generated from images acquired by theHiRISE camera using its red filter and blue-green filter.
Images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment and additional information about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are available online at: http://www.nasa.gov/mro or http://HiRISE.lpl.arizona.edu.For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, http://www.nasa.gov.
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems is the prime contractor for the project and built the spacecraft. The HiRISE camera was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation and is operated by the University of Arizona.
On its 825th Martian day (May 20, 2006), NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity stopped for the weekend to place its instrument arm onto the soil target pictured here, dubbed "Alamogordo Creek." Two views from the panoramic camera, acquired at about noon local solar time, are at the top. Below them is a close-up view from the microscopic imager.
At upper left, a false-color view emphasizes differences among materials in rocks and soil. It combines images taken through the panoramic camera's 753-nanometer, 535-nanometer and 432-nanometer filters. At upper right is an approximately true-color rendering made with the panoramic camera's 600-nanometer, 535-nanometer and 480-nanometer filters. The microscopic-imager frame covers the area outlined by the white boxes in the panoramic-camera views, a rectangle 3 centimeters (1.2 inches) across.
As Opportunity traverses to the south, it is analyzing soil and rocks along the way for differences from those seen earlier. At this site, the soil contains abundant small spherical fragments, thought to be hematite-rich concretions, plus finer-grained basaltic sand. Most of the spherical fragments seen in the microscopic image are smaller than those first seen at the rover's landing site in "Eagle Crater," some five kilometers (3.1 miles) to the north. However, a few larger spherical fragments and other rock fragments can also be seen in the panoramic-camera images.
Both out on the plains of Gusev Crater and in the "Columbia Hills," NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has encountered a thin (approximately 1 millimeter or 0.04 inch thick), light-colored, fine-grained layer of material on top of a dark-colored, coarser layer of soil. In the hills, Spirit stopped to take a closer look at soil compacted by one of the rover's wheels. Spirit took this image with the front hazard-avoidance camera during the rover's 314th martian day, or sol (Nov. 19, 2004).
This 360-degree panorama shows the vista from the location where NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity spent five weeks in November and December 2008 while the sun was nearly directly in between Mars and Earth, limiting communications.
Opportunity is approaching the fifth Earth-year anniversary of its landing on Mars, continuing a surface mission that was initially scheduled to last three months. The rover landed on Jan. 24, 2004 (Pacific Standard Time; Jan. 25, 2004 Universal Time). When it reached the location from which its panoramic camera (Pancam) captured this view, it had driven a total of 13,616 meters (8.46 miles) since its landing.
The view combines 276 different exposures taken with Opportunity's panoramic camera (Pancam)—92 pointings, with three filters at each pointing. The component images were taken during the period from the rover's 1,716th Martian day, or sol, to the mission's Sol 1719 (Nov. 21 to 24, 2008).
Opportunity has driven 1.83 kilometers (1.14 miles) since it exited Victoria Crater on Sol 1634 (Aug. 28, 2008). It skirted the west rim of Victoria and, at the point from which this panorama was taken, had reached a position about a kilometer (six-tenths of a mile) southwest of the south rim of the crater.
North is in the center of the panorama. Rover tracks are visible from the drive to the location from which the Pancam captured this view. For scale, the distance between the parallel wheel tracks is about one meter (3 feet).
Opportunity is on a 12-kilometer (7-mile) trek toward Endeavour crater (see PIA11737) a crater more than 20 times the size of Victoria Crater, which Opportunity studied for about two years. On the way toward Endeavour the rover is pausing to examine selected loose rocks on the surface. At the location from which this panorama was taken, the rover used the spectrometers on its robotic arm to examine a cobble informally called "Santorini," a dark rock about 8 centimeters (3 inches) long, which the inspection indicates is probably a meteorite. The rock is too close to the rover to be visible in this panorama.
The lighter-toned patches of ground in this view are sulfate-rich bedrock. Darker patches are dark, windblown sand. The metal post in the foreground is the top of Opportunity's low-gain antenna.
Opportunity began driving again on Sol 1748 (Dec. 23, 2008).
This is an approximate true-color, red-green-blue composite panorama generated from images taken through the Pancam's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer filters. This "natural color" view is the rover team's best estimate of what the scene would look like if we were there and able to see it with our own eyes.
Voir l'image PIA11754: Full-Circle "Santorini" Panorama from Opportunity sur le site de la NASA.
This 360-degree panorama shows the terrain surrounding NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit as of the rover's 305th martian day, or sol, (Nov. 11, 2004). At that point, Spirit was climbing the "West Spur" of the "Columbia Hills." The rover had just finished inspecting a rock called "Lutefisk" and was heading uphill toward an area called "Machu Picchu." Spirit used its navigational camera to take the images combined into this mosaic. The rover's location when the images were taken is catalogued as the mission's site 89, position 205. The view is presented here as a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
This photo composite shows an aerial view of FedEx Field in Landover, Md., home of the Washington Redskins, superimposed on Mars' Victoria Crater to give a sense of the crater's scale.
As NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity continues to traverse from "Erebus Crater" toward "Victoria Crater," the rover navigates along exposures of bedrock between large, wind-blown ripples. Along the way, scientists have been studying fields of cobbles that sometimes appear on trough floors between ripples. They have also been studying the banding patterns seen in large ripples.
This view, obtained by Opportunity's panoramic camera on the rover's 802nd Martian day (sol) of exploration (April 27, 2006), is a mosaic spanning about 30 degrees. It shows a field of cobbles nestled among wind-driven ripples that are about 20 centimeters (8 inches) high.
The origin of cobble fields like this one is unknown. The cobbles may be a lag of coarser material left behind from one or more soil deposits whose finer particles have blown away. The cobbles may be eroded fragments of meteoritic material, secondary ejecta of Mars rock thrown here from craters elsewhere on the surface, weathering remnants of locally-derived bedrock, or a mixture of these. Scientists will use the panoramic camera's multiple filters to study the rock types, variability and origins of the cobbles.
This is an approximately true-color rendering that combines separate images taken through the panoramic camera's 753-nanometer, 535-nanometer and 432-nanometer filters.
Clouds appear in the martian sky above "Endurance Crater" in this mosaic of frames taken by the navigation camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity during the morning of the rover's 291st sol (Nov. 17, 2004). The view spans an arc from the east on the left to the southwest on the right.
Opportunity has observed differences in cloudiness from one sol to the next, a reminder that Mars, like Earth, has daily weather as well as longer-term seasonal changes.
The images that are combined to produce this view have been processed to remove geometrical distortion associated with the camera's 45-degree field of view. In addition, special image processing has been applied to the original images to enhance the clouds and make them visible across the entire mosaic. Glare from the Sun washed out the clouds on the left in the original images; this glare was removed. The left-most image in this mosaic contains some artifacts from pointing the camera toward the Sun. The rim of Endurance has been processed separately and merged back with the sky to better show the context.
Alternating layers of more-resisant and less-resistant material make up this portion of a rock called "Tetl," on the west spur of the "Columbia Hills" on Mars. NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit took this picture with its microscopic imager on the rover's 272nd martian day (Oct. 7, 2004). The view covers an area about 3 centimeters (1.2 inches) wide. The layers that are less resistant to eroding away recede in comparison to the more-resistant layers. Granules of apparently harder material can be seen eroding out of some layers. Several possible origins could account for this type of layering. One that scientists are considering for Tetl and similarly layered rocks is from multiple events of volcanic ash falling from the sky or flowing across the land. Another is from episodes of sediment precipitating from a body of water.
This animated piece illustrates the recent escape of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity from dangerous, loose material on the vast plains leading to the rover's next long-term target, "Victoria Crater."
A series of images of the rover's left front wheel, taken by the front hazard-avoidance camera, make up this brief movie. It chronicles the challenge Opportunity faced to free itself from a ripple dubbed "Jammerbugt." The rover's wheels became partially embedded in the ripple at the end of a drive on Opportunity's 833rd Martian day, or sol (May 28, 2006). The images in this clip were taken on sols 836 through 841 (May 31 through June 5, 2006).
Scientists and engineers who had been elated at the meters of progress the rover had been making in earlier drives were happy for even centimeters of advance per sol as they maneuvered their explorer through the slippery material of Jammerbugt. The wheels reached solid footing on a rock outcrop on the final sol of this sequence.
The science and engineering teams appropriately chose the ripple's informal from name the name of a bay on the north coast of Denmark. Jammerbugt, or Jammerbugten, loosely translated, means Bay of Lamentation or Bay of Wailing. The shipping route from the North Sea to the Baltic passes Jammerbugt on its way around the northern tip of Jutland. This has always been an important trade route and many ships still pass by the bay. The prevailing wind directions are typically northwest to southwest with the strongest winds and storms tending to blow from the northwest. A northwesterly wind will blow straight into the Jammerbugt, towards shore. Therefore, in the age of sail, many ships sank there during storms. The shore is sandy, but can have strong waves, so running aground was very dangerous even though there are no rocks.
Fortunately, Opportunity weathered its "Jammerbugt" and is again on its way toward Victoria Crater.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity examined a boulder called "Wopmay" before heading further east inside "Endurance Crater." The frames combined into this false-color view were taken by Opportunity's panoramic camera during the rover's 251st martian day (Oct. 7, 2004). The coloring accentuates iron-rich spherical concretions as bluish dots embedded in the rock and on the ground around it. The rock is about one meter (3 feet) across. The slope of the ground and loose surface material around the rock prevented Opportunity from getting firm enough footing to use its rock abrasion tool on Wopmay. Evidence from the rover's spectrometers and microscopic imager is consistent with a possibility that rocks near the bottom of the crater were affected by water both before and after the crater formed. The evidence is still not conclusive.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its navigation camera on the rover's 381st and 382nd martian days, or sols, (Feb. 18 and 19, 2005) to take the images combined into this 360-degree panorama. Opportunity had driven 64 meters (209 feet) on sol 381 to arrive at this location close to a small crater dubbed "Alvin." The location is catalogued as Opportunity's Site 43. This view is presented in a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
NASA's Mars rover Opportunity reached the rim of "Victoria Crater" in Mars' Meridiani Planum region with a 26-meter (85-foot) drive during the rover's 951st Martian day, or sol (Sept. 26, 2006). After the drive, the rover's navigation camera took the three exposures combined into this view of the crater's interior. This crater has been the mission's long-term destination for the past 21 Earth months.
A half mile in the distance one can see about 20 percent of the far side of the crater framed by the rocky cliffs in the foreground to the left and right of the image. The rim of the crater is composed of alternating promontories, rocky points towering approximately 70 meters (230 feet) above the crater floor, and recessed alcoves. The bottom of the crater is covered by sand that has been shaped into ripples by the Martian wind.
The position at the end of the sol 951 drive is about six meters from the lip of an alcove called "Duck Bay." The rover team planned a drive for sol 952 that would move a few more meters forward, plus more imaging of the near and far walls of the crater.
Victoria Crater is about five times wider than "Endurance Crater," which Opportunity spent six months examining in 2004, and about 40 times wider than "Eagle Crater," where Opportunity first landed.
This view is presented as a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
Clouds in the martian sky above "Endurance Crater" in this image from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity can remind the viewer that Mars, our celestial neighbor, is subject to weather. On Earth, clouds like these would be referred to as "cirrus" or theaptly nicknamed "mares' tails." These clouds occur in a region of strong vertical shear. The cloud particles (ice in this martiancase) fall out, and get dragged along away from the location where they originally condensed, forming characteristic streamers. Opportunity took this picture with its navigation camera during the rover's 282nd martian day (Nov. 8, 2004).
The mission's atmospheric science team is studying cloud observations to deduce seasonal and time-of-day behavior of the clouds. This helps them gain a better understanding of processes that control cloud formation.
NASA's Mars Rover Spirit has been analyzing sulfur-rich rocks and surface materials in the "Columbia Hills" in Gusev Crater on Mars. This image of a very soft, nodular, layered rock nicknamed "Peace" in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. shows a 4.5-centimeter-wide (1.8-inch-wide) hole Spirit ground into the surface with the rover's rock abrasion tool. The high sulfur content of the rock measured by Spirit's alpha particle X-ray spectrometer and its softness measured by the abrasion tool are probably evidence of past alteration by water. Spirit's panoramic camera took this false-color image on martian day, or sol, 381 (Jan. 27, 2005), using Pancam filters at wavelengths of 750, 530, and 430 nanometers. Darker red hues in the image correspond to greater concentrations of oxidized soil and dust. Bluer hues correspond to sulfur-rich rock excavated or exposed by the abrasion tool and not as heavily coated with soils or not as highly oxidized.
Click on the image for Opportunity's 'Rub al Khali' Panorama (QTVR)
This panoramic image, dubbed "Rub al Khali," was acquired by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity on the plains of Meridiani during the period from the rover's 456th to 464th sols on Mars (May 6 to May 14, 2005). Opportunity was about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) south of "Endurance Crater" at a place known informally as "Purgatory Dune."
The rover was stuck in the dune's deep fine sand for more than a month. "Rub al Khali" (Arabic translation: "the empty quarter") was chosen as the name for this panorama because it is the name of a similarly barren, desolate part of the Saudi Arabian desert on Earth.
The view spans 360 degrees. It consists of images obtained in 97 individual pointings of the panoramic camera. The camera took images with five camera filters at each pointing. This 22,780-by-6,000-pixel mosaic is an approximately true-color rendering generated using the images acquired through filters admitting light wavelengths of 750, 530, and 480 nanometers.
Lighting varied during the nine sols it took to acquire this panorama, resulting in some small image seams within the mosaic. These seams have been smoothed in sky parts of the mosaic to better simulate the vista that a person would see if able to view it all at the same time on Mars.
Opportunity's tracks leading back to the north (center of the panorama) are a reminder of the rover's long trek from Endurance Crater. The deep ruts dug by Opportunity's wheels as it became stuck in the sand appear in the foreground. The crest and trough of the last ripple the rover crossed before getting stuck is visible in the center. These wind-formed sand features are only about 10 to 15 centimeters (4 to 6 inches) tall. The crest of the actual ripple where the rover got stuck can be seen just to the right of center. The tracks and a few other places on and near ripple crests can be seen in this color image to be dustier than the undisturbed or "normal" plains soils in Meridiani. Since the time these ruts were made, some of the dust there has been blown away by the wind, reaffirming the dynamic nature of the martian environment, even in this barren, ocean-like desert of sand.
This approximate true-color rendering from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit shows a set of darker rocks dubbed "Toltecs" lying southeast of the rover's current position. These rocks are believed to be basaltic, or volcanic, in composition, because their spectral properties match those of other basaltic rocks studied in Gusev Crater. Scientists hope to use these presumably unaltered rocks as a geologic standard for comparison to altered rocks in the area, such as "Clovis." This image was taken with the panoramic camera's 600-, 530-, and 480-nanometer filters on sol 220 (Aug. 15, 2004).
On the way out of "Endurance Crater," NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has been making observations along the crater wall, an intriguing and revealing geological path. One factor that immediately caught the eyes of scientists was a noticeable difference between light rocks and dark rocks along the crater rim. The pictured rock, "Tipuna," lies just under the dividing line, in the dark section. Opportunity's panoramic camera took this image during the rover's 306th martian day, or sol (Dec. 3, 2004). The image gives an up-close view of Tipuna, revealing complex layering that was likely caused by ancient flowing water or wind deposition. Scientists have used the rover's rock abrasion tool to expose interior material for analysis on both dark and light rocks near Tipuna.
This image from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows a portion of the heat shield that the spacecraft jettisoned shortly before landing. This flank piece broke off from the main piece of the heat shield upon impact. The crater created by the impact of the heat shield can be seen in the upper right of the image. Rover tracks appear across the top of the image. Opportunity took this image with its navigation camera during the rover's 331st martian day, or sol (Dec. 28, 2004).
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity was on its way from "Endurance Crater" toward the spacecraft's jettisoned heat shield when the navigation camera took the images combined into this 360-degree panorama. Opportunity drove 60 meters (197 feet) on its 321st martian day, or sol (Dec. 18, 2004). These images were taken later that sol and on the following sol. The rover had spent 181 sols inside the crater. This view is presented in a cylindrical projection without seam correction.
Here is the martian twilight sky at Gusev crater, as imaged by the panoramic camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit around 6:20 in the evening of the rover's 464th martian day, or sol (April 23, 2005). Spirit was commanded to stay awake briefly after sending that sol's data to Mars Odyssey at sunset. This small panorama of the western sky was obtained using camera's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer color filters. This filter combination allows false color images to be generated that are similar to what a human would see, but with the colors exaggerated. In this image, the bluish glow in the sky above where the Sun had just set would be visible to us if we were there, but the redness of the sky farther from the sunset is exaggerated compared to the daytime colors of the martian sky.
These kinds of images are beautiful and evocative, but they also have important scientific purposes. Specifically, twilight images are occasionally acquired by the science team to determine how high into the atmosphere the martian dust extends, and to look for dust or ice clouds. Other images have shown that the twilight glow remains visible, but increasingly fainter, for up to two hours before sunrise or after sunset. The long martian twilight compared to Earth's is caused by sunlight scattered around to the night side of the planet by abundant high altitude dust. Similar long twilights or extra-colorful sunrises and sunsets sometimes occur on Earth when tiny dust grains that are erupted from powerful volcanoes scatter light high in the atmosphere. These kinds of twilight images are also more sensitive to faint cloud structures, though none were detected when these images were acquired. Clouds have been rare at Gusev crater during Spirit's 16-month mission so far.
This mosaic was made from frames acquired by the microscopic imager on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit during Spirit's 1,031 Martian day, or sol, on the red planet (Nov. 27, 2006). It shows a rock target called "King George Island" after the target was brushed by the rover's rock abrasion tool. The mosaic covers approximately 6 centimeters (2.4 inches) across and shows the granular nature of the rock exposure. The grains are typically about 1 millimeter (.04 inches) wide. Data from the rover's Moessbauer spectrometer provides evidence that they have an enhanced amount of the mineral hematite relative to surrounding soils.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity looks through its navigation camera as it leaves the home it has known for over 200 sols. The rover spent 181 sols inside "Endurance Crater," furthering our knowledge of ancient water on Mars. After that challenging work, it spent 25 sols investigating the heat shield that protected it on its way through the martian atmosphere and the nearby meteorite that was the first discovered on another planet. Opportunity is saying 'so long' and heading south for a small crater referred to as "Argo." This image was taken on the rover's 359th sol on Mars (January 26, 2005).
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its navigation camera to take the images combined into this 360-degree view of the rover's surroundings on the 399th martian day, or sol, of its surface mission (March 8, 2005). Opportunity drove 35 meters (115 feet) that sol and reached the edge of "Vostok Crater" before taking the images. Sand has buried much of the crater. This location is catalogued as Opportunity's site 50. The view is presented in a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
Voir l'image PIA07468: Beside 'Vostok Crater' sur le site de la NASA.
Click on the image for Stereo Version of Spirit's 'Thanksgiving' Panorama (QTVR)
Left-eye view of a stereo pair for PIA08752
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit used its panoramic camera (Pancam) to record a 360-degree vista, dubbed the "Thanksgiving" panorama, from the northwestern side of "Husband Hill" in late 2004. This view is a stereo anaglyph of the Thanksgiving panorama, showing it in three dimensions to viewers using red-blue stereo glasses.
The images combined into this anaglyph were taken through the Pancam's infrared L2 and R2 filters during Spirit's 318th through 325th Martian days (Nov. 24 through Dec. 2, 2004). Geometric and brightness adjustments have been applied. The view is presented in a cylindrical-perspective projection with rover tilt removed.
For additional information about the Thanksgiving panorama, see PIA07334.
NASA's Mars rover Opportunity edged 3.7 meters (12 feet) closer to the top of the "Duck Bay" alcove along the rim of "Victoria Crater" during the rover's 952nd Martian day, or sol (overnight Sept. 27 to Sept. 28), and gained this vista of the crater. The rover's navigation camera took the seven exposures combined into this mosaic view of the crater's interior. This crater has been the mission's long-term destination for the past 21 Earth months.
The far side of the crater is about 800 meters (one-half mile) away. The rim of the crater is composed of alternating promontories, rocky points towering approximately 70 meters (230 feet) above the crater floor, and recessed alcoves, such as Duck Bay. The bottom of the crater is covered by sand that has been shaped into ripples by the Martian wind. The rocky cliffs in the foreground have been informally named "Cape Verde," on the left, and "Cabo Frio," on the right.
Victoria Crater is about five times wider than "Endurance Crater," which Opportunity spent six months examining in 2004, and about 40 times wider than "Eagle Crater," where Opportunity first landed. The great lure of Victoria is an expectation that the thick stack of geological layers exposed in the crater walls could reveal the record of past environmental conditions over a much greater span of time than Opportunity has read from rocks examined earlier in the mission.
This view is presented as a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
In recent days, controllers directed NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit to back up and turn to try to dislodge a potato-size rock from Spirit's right rear wheel. The rock did not present a threat -- it was sort of like having a pebble stuck in your shoe -- but the rover team was taking no chances that the rock might work its way deeper inside the rover's wheel well. The rock can be seen in the lower left side of this image, which Spirit took with its right rear hazard avoidance camera on martian day, or sol, 345 (Dec. 21, 2004). By the following day, the rock had rolled out onto the martian sand.
As NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit began collecting images for a 360-degree panorama of new terrain, the rover captured this view of a dark boulder with an interesting surface texture. The boulder sits about 40 centimeters (16 inches) tall on Martian sand about 5 meters (16 feet) away from Spirit. It is one of many dark, volcanic rock fragments -- many pocked with rounded holes called vesicles -- littering the slope of "Low Ridge." The rock surface facing the rover is similar in appearance to the surface texture on the outside of lava flows on Earth.
Spirit took this false-color image with the panoramic camera on the rover's 810th sol, or Martian day, of exploring Mars (April 13, 2006). This image is a false-color rendering using camera's 753-nanometer, 535-nanometer, and 432-nanometer filters.
This movie clip shows a dust devil scooting across a plain inside Gusev Crater on Mars as seen from the NASA rover Spirit's hillside vantage point during the rover's 456th martian day, or sol (April 15, 2005). The individual images were taken about 20 seconds apart by Spirit's navigation camera, and the contrast has been enhanced for anything in the images that changes from frame to frame, that is, for the dust devil.
The movie results from a new way of watching for dust devils, which are whirlwinds that hoist dust from the surface into the air. Spirit began seeing dust devils in isolated images in March 2005. At first, the rover team relied on luck. It might catch a dust devil in an image or it might miss by a few minutes. Using the new detection strategy, the rover takes a series of 21 images. Spirit sends a few of them to Earth, as well as little thumbnail images of all of them. Team members use the 3 big images and all the small images to decide whether the additional big images have dust devils. For this movie, they specifically told Spirit to send back frames that they knew had dust devils.
The images were processed in three steps. All images were calibrated to remove known camera artifacts. The images were then processed to remove stationary objects. The result is a gray scene showing only features that change with time. The final step combined the original image with the image that shows only moving features, showing the martian scene and the enhanced dust devils.
Scientists expected dust devils since before Spirit landed. The landing area inside Gusev Crater is filled with dark streaks left behind when dust devils pick dust up from an area. It is also filled with bright "hollows," which are dust-filled miniature craters. Dust covers most of the terrain. Winds flow into and out of Gusev crater every day. The Sun heats the surface so that the surface is warm to the touch even though the atmosphere at 2 meters (6 feet) above the surface would be chilly. That temperature contrast causes convection. Mixing the dust, winds, and convection should trigger dust devils.
Scientists will use the images to study several things. Tracking the dust devils tells which way the wind blows at different times of day. Statistics on the size of typical dust devils will help with estimates of how much dust they pump into the atmosphere every day. By watching individual dust devils change as they go over more-dusty and less-dusty terrain, researchers can learn about the turbulent motion near the surface. Ultimately, that motion of wind and dust near the surface relates these small dust devils with Mars' large dust storms.
NASA'S Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this westward view from atop a low plateau where Sprit spent the closing months of 2007.
After several months near the base of the plateau called "Home Plate" in the inner basin of the Columbia Hills range inside Gusev Crater, Spirit climbed onto the eastern edge of the plateau during the rover's 1,306th Martian day, or sol, (Sept. 5, 2007). It examined rocks and soils at several locations on the southern half of Home Plate during September and October. It was perched near the western edge of Home Plate when it used its panoramic camera (Pancam) to take the images used in this view on sols 1,366 through 1,369 (Nov. 6 through Nov. 9, 2007). With its daily solar-energy supply shrinking as Martian summer turned to fall, Spirit then drove to the northern edge of Home Plate for a favorable winter haven. The rover reached that northward-tilting site in December, in time for the fourth Earth-year anniversary of its landing on Mars. Spirit reached Mars on Jan. 4, 2004, Universal Time (Jan. 3, 2004, Pacific Standard Time). It landed at a site at about the center of the horizon in this image.
This panorama covers a scene spanning left to right from southwest to northeast. The western edge of Home Plate is in the foreground, generally lighter in tone than the more distant parts of the scene. A rock-dotted hill in the middle distance across the left third of the image is "Tsiolkovski Ridge," about 30 meters or 100 feet from the edge of Home Plate and about that same distance across. A bump on the horizon above the left edge of Tsiolkovski Ridge is "Grissom Hill," about 8 kilometers or 5 miles away. At right, the highest point of the horizon is "Husband Hill," to the north and about 800 meters or half a mile away.
This view combines separate images taken through Pancam filters centered on wavelengths of 753 nanometers, 535 nanometers and 432 nanometers. It is presented in a false-color stretch to bring out subtle color differences in the scene.
Voir l'image PIA10214: Spirit's West Valley Panorama (False Color) sur le site de la NASA.
This mosaic of frames from the navigation camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity gives a view to the northeast from the rover's position on its 1,687th Martian day, or sol (Oct. 22, 2008).
By that date, Opportunity had driven southwestward from Victoria Crater, beginning a long trek toward a larger crater, Endeavour.
Voir l'image PIA11743: View from Southwest of Victoria Crater sur le site de la NASA.
The rock in the center foreground of this picture is suspected of being an iron meteorite. The panoramic camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit took this image during the rover's 809th Martian day (April 12, 2006). The foreground rock, informally named "Allan Hills," and a similar rock called "Zhong Shan," just out of the field of view to the left, have a smoother texture and lighter tone than other rocks in the area.
The texture and glossiness of this pair reminded some members of the rover science team of a rock called "Heat Shield Rock," which was observed by Opportunity, Spirit's twin, in the Meridiani region of Mars more than a year ago. Examination of that rock's composition confirmed it to be an iron meteorite (see PIA07269).
Observations of Allan Hills and Zhong Shan with Spirit's miniature thermal emission spectrometer indicate that they are very reflective, like Heat Shield Rock. They are the first likely meteorites found by Spirit.
Rocks in the vicinity of Spirit's winter station are being assigned informal names honoring Antarctic research stations. Zhong Shan is an Antarctic base established by China in 1989. Allan Hills is a site where meteorites are frequently collected because they are relatively easy to see as dark rocks on the bright Antarctic ice. The most famous Allan Hills meteorite from Antarctica actually came from Mars and landed on Earth. If the Zhong Chang and Allan Hills rocks seen by Spirit do turn out to be iron-rich meteorites, they may have originated from an asteroid and landed on Mars.
This view is a false-color rendering to emphasize differences among rock and soil materials. It combines images taken through the panoramic camera's 753-nanometer, 535-nanometer, and 432-nanometer filters. It is a portion of an image previously released (see PIA08094).
This image taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows a target dubbed "Bylot" on the slopes of "Endurance Crater." Opportunity dug a hole into the target with its rock abrasion tool, then captured this picture with its microscopic imager on sol 196 (Aug. 12, 2004). The image mosaic is about 6 centimeters (2.4 inches) across.
Click on the image for 'Lookout Panorama' from Spirit (QTVR)
Click on the image for 'Lookout Panorama' from Spirit animation
This is the Spirit panoramic camera's "Lookout" panorama, acquired on the rover's 410th to 413th martian days, or sols (Feb. 27 to Mar. 2, 2005). The view is from a position known informally as "Larry's Lookout" along the drive up "Husband Hill." The summit of Husband Hill is the far peak near the center of this panorama and is about 200 meters (656 feet) away from the rover and about 45 meters (148 feet) higher in elevation. The bright rocky outcrop near the center of the panorama is part of the "Cumberland Ridge," and beyond that and to the left is the "Tennessee Valley."
The panorama spans 360 degrees and consists of images obtained in 108 individual pointings and five filters at each pointing. This mosaic is an approximately true-color rendering generated using the images acquired through panoramic camera's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer, and 480-nanometer filters. The lighting varied considerably during the four sols that it took to acquire this image (partly because of imaging at different times of sol, but also partly because of small sol-to-sol variations in the dustiness of the atmosphere), resulting in some obvious image seams or rock shadow variations within the mosaic. These seams have been smoothed out from the sky parts of the mosaic in order to simulate better the vista that a person would have if they were viewing it all at the same time on Mars. However, it is often not possible or practical to smooth out such seams for regions of rock, soil, rover tracks, or solar panels. Such is the nature of acquiring and assembling large Pancam panoramas from the rovers.
Spirit's tracks leading back from the "West Spur" region can be seen on the right side of the panorama. The region just beyond the area where the tracks made their last zig-zag is the area known as "Paso Robles," where Spirit discovered rock and soil deposits with very high sulfur abundances. After acquiring this mosaic (which took several weeks to fully downlink and then several more weeks to process), Spirit drove around the Cumberland Ridge rocks seen here and is now driving up the flank of Husband Hill, heading toward the summit.
Annotated Version
Click on the image for full view
The red-and-white line on this image traces the route that NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity drove from its landing inside Eagle Crater on Jan. 4, 2004 (Universal Time; Jan. 3 Pacific Standard Time) through the 1,742nd Martian day, or sol, of the mission (Dec. 17, 2008). During that period, Opportunity drove 13.62 kilometers (8.5 miles).
Opportunity climbed out of the 800-meter-wide (half-mile-wide) Victoria Crater on Sol 1634 (Aug. 28, 2008). The rover's next major destination is a much larger crater further south, Endeavour Crater, with a diameter of about 22 kilometers (14 miles).
The route and labels on this map are overlain on an image from the Thermal Emission Imaging System camera on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter.
Voir l'image PIA11738: Opportunity Sol 1742 Traverse Map with Endeavour Crater sur le site de la NASA.
This mosaic of 24 frames from the microscopic imager on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit shows the texture of a target called "Keystone" on the "Methuselah" outcrop of layered rock on "Husband Hill" inside Mars' Gusev Crater. The images were taken on Spirit's 469th martian day, or "sol (April 28, 2005). The target area shows fine layers that may have been deposited by wind or water. The individual frames are each 3 centimeters (1.2 inches) across and they overlap slightly in this array of six frames horizontally by four frames vertically. The target was fully shadowed when the images were acquired. The scale of the images (31 microns or one one-thousandth of an inch per pixel) allows features as small as 0.1 millimeter (four one-thousandths of an inch) to be resolved.
Click on the image to view the animation
Lower resolution animation
This animation shows a hypothetical flyover above Victoria Crater, where NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is perched on a rim. The rover is expected to begin rolling down into the crater in early July 2007.
The first part of the movie is based on data taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera. A simulated rover is shown at the site where Opportunity will enter the crater, an alcove nicknamed "Duck Bay." The movie then transitions to a panoramic view of Victoria Crater taken from the top of Duck Bay by Opportunity's panoramic camera.
This false-color image taken by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows a rock informally named "Earhart" on the lower slopes of "Endurance Crater." The rock was named after the pilot Amelia Earhart. Like "Escher" and other rocks dotting the bottom of Endurance, scientists believe fractures in Earhart could have been formed by one of several processes. They may have been caused by the impact that created Endurance Crater, or they might have arisen when water leftover from the rock's formation dried up. A third possibility is that much later, after the rock was formed, and after the crater was created, the rock became wet once again, then dried up and developed cracks. Rover team members do not have plans to investigate Earhart in detail because it is located across potentially hazardous sandy terrain. This image was taken on sol 219 (Sept. 4) by the rover's panoramic camera, using its 750-, 530- and 430-nanometer filters.
As part of its investigation of "Victoria Crater," NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity examined a promontory called "Cape Verde" from the vantage point of "Cape St. Mary," the next promontory clockwise around the crater's deeply scalloped rim. This view of Cape Verde combines several exposures taken by the rover's panoramic camera into an approximately true-color mosaic. The exposures were taken during mid-afternoon lighting conditions.
The upper portion of the crater wall contains a jumble of material tossed outward by the impact that excavated the crater. This vertical cross-section through the blanket of ejected material surrounding the crater was exposed by erosion that expanded the crater outward from its original diameter, according to scientists' interpretation of the observations. Below the jumbled material in the upper part of the wall are layers that survive relatively intact from before the crater-causing impact.
The images combined into this mosaic were taken during the 1,006th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity's Mars-surface mission (Nov. 22, 2006). The panoramic camera took them through the camera's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer filters.
NASA's twin Mars Exploration Rovers have been getting smarter as they get older. This view from Opportunity shows the tracks left by a drive executed with more onboard autonomy than has been used on any other drive by a Mars rover.
Opportunity made the curving, 15.8-meter (52-foot) drive during its 1,160th Martian day, or sol (April 29, 2007). It was testing a navigational capability called "Field D-star," which enables the rover to plan optimal long-range drives around any obstacles in order to travel the most direct safe route to the drive's designated destination. Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, did not have this capability until the third year after their January 2004 landings on Mars. Earlier, they could recognize hazards when they approached them closely, then back away and try another angle, but could not always find a safe route away from hazards. Field D-Star and several other upgrades were part of new onboard software uploaded from Earth in 2006. The Sol 1,160 drive by Opportunity was a Martian field test of Field D-Star and also used several other features of autonomy, including visual odometry to track the rover's actual position after each segment of the drive, avoidance of designated keep-out zones, and combining information from two sets of stereo images to consider a wide swath of terrain in analyzing the route.
Two days later, on Sol 1,162, (May 1, 2007), Opportunity was still at the location it reached during that drive, and the rover's panoramic camera (Pancam) took the exposures combined into this image.
Victoria Crater is in the background, at the top of the image. The Sol 1,160 drive began at the place near the center of the image where tracks overlap each other. Tracks farther away were left by earlier drives nearer to the northern rim of the crater. For scale, the distance between the parallel tracks left by the rover's wheels is about 1 meter (39 inches) from the middle of one track to the middle of the other. The rocks in the center foreground are roughly 7 to 10 centimeters (3 to 4 inches) tall. The rover could actually drive over them easily, but for this test, settings in the onboard hazard-detection software were adjusted to make these smaller rocks be considered dangerous to the rover. The patch of larger rocks to the right was set as a keep-out zone. The location from which this image was taken is where the rover stopped driving to communicate with Earth. A straight line from the starting point to the destination would be 11 meters (36 feet). Opportunity plotted and followed a smoothly curved, efficient path around the rocks, always keeping the rover in safe areas.
This view combines separate images taken through the Pancam filters centered on wavelengths of 753 nanometers, 535 nanometers and 432 nanometers to produce an approximately true-color panorama.
Voir l'image PIA10213: D-Star Panorama by Opportunity sur le site de la NASA.
A promontory nicknamed "Cape Verde" can be seen jutting out from the walls of Victoria Crater in this false-color picture taken by the panoramic camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. The rover took this picture on martian day, or sol, 1329 (Oct. 20, 2007), more than a month after it began descending down the crater walls -- and just 9 sols shy of its second Martian birthday on sol 1338 (Oct. 29, 2007). Opportunity landed on the Red Planet on Jan. 25, 2004. That's nearly four years ago on Earth, but only two on Mars because Mars takes longer to travel around the sun than Earth. One Martian year equals 687 Earth days.
This view was taken using three panoramic-camera filters, admitting light with wavelengths centered at 750 nanometers (near infrared), 530 nanometers (green) and 430 nanometers (violet).
This image shows coarse-grained layers from around the edge of a low plateau called "Home Plate" inside Mars' Gusev Crater. One possible origin is material falling to the ground after being thrown aloft by an explosion such as a volcanic eruption or meteorite impact.
The panoramic camera (Pancam) on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit acquired the exposures for this image on Spirit's 749th Martian day (Feb. 10, 2006). This view is an approximately true-color rendering mathematically generated from separate images taken through all of the left Pancam's 432-nanometer to 753-nanometer filters.
This image taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows a target dubbed "Campbell" on a rock called "MacKenzie" in "Endurance Crater." Opportunity dug a hole into the target with its rock abrasion tool, then captured this picture with its microscopic imager on sol 184 (July 30, 2004). The image mosaic is about 6 centimeters (2.4 inches) across.
Taking advantage of lengthening shadows during the onset of winter and at different times of day, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit acquired this series of images accentuating subtle features in the terrain. Images acquired at low sun angles allow scientists to better understand differences in surface roughness among soils and rocks. Variations in how brightly sunlight reflects off surfaces under different lighting conditions help scientists estimate the microscopic physical characteristics of the mineral grains in different rocks and soils. Shadows from the rover itself are visible in the foreground of the late-afternoon mosaic and cover part of the rover's tracks and disturbed, light-toned soils.
Spirit acquired these sets of images at different local true solar times (LTST) on Martian days, known as sols, 930 (Aug. 15, 2006), 931 (Aug. 16, 2006), and 935 (Aug. 20, 2006) using the 601-nanometer filter of the panoramic camera. Spirit acquired the mosaics of the rover's tracks, composed of three frames each, with the panoramic camera turned to an azimuth of 110 degrees (east-southeast).
A bulbous texture is evident in this rock target at the outcrop called "Jibsheet" in this view from the microscopic imager on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. Frames making up this mosaic image of a target dubbed "Reef" were taken during the rover's 481st martian day, or sol (May 11, 2005).
Click on the image for 'Cahokia' Panorama (QTVR)
This stunning image mosaic of the "Columbia Hills" is the first 360-degree panorama taken since the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit arrived at the hills over a month ago. The rover has been busy studying the rocks here, which show evidence of past alteration by water. The dark patch of soil to the right is the spot where Spirit stopped for engineering work on its right front wheel. Spirit's tracks can be followed from there all the way back to "Bonneville Crater" and the original landing site, more than 3 kilometers (1.86 miles) away.
This approximate true-color image, nicknamed the "Cahokia panorama" after the Native American archaeological site near St. Louis, was acquired between sols 213 to 223 (Aug. 9 to 19, 2004). The panorama consists of 470 images acquired through six panoramic camera filters (750 to 480 nanometers). It took until the week of sol 237 (Sept. 2) to downlink all the data back to Earth. Several more weeks of image processing and geometric mapping by team members at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., were required to stitch all the images together into this spectacular mosaic.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity acquired this false-color image of the rim of the 35-meter (115-foot) diameter Beagle Crater on Martian day, or sol, 894 (July 30, 2006) using the panoramic camera's 753-nanometer, 535-nanometer, and 432-nanometer filters. At the time the rover was about 25 meters (82 feet) from Beagle Crater, looking east-southeast. The image reveals ejecta blocks near the rover, the largest of which is about 50 centimeters (20 inches) across. The image also shows a portion of the eastern interior rim of Beagle Crater, which appears composed of jumbled, angular blocks of brighter and darker outcrop rocks. The rover will drive to the rim of Beagle and acquire an extensive color panorama of the crater rim and interior in the coming sols.
One part of the research program that NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is conducting while sitting at a favorable location for wintertime solar energy is the most detailed panorama yet taken on the surface of Mars. This view is a partial preliminary product from the continuing work on the full image, which will be called the "McMurdo Panorama."
Spirit's panoramic camera (Pancam) began taking exposures for the McMurdo Panorama on the rover's 814th Martian day (April 18, 2006). The rover has accumulated more than 900 exposures for this panorama so far, through all of the Pancam mineralogy filters and using little or no image compression. Even with a tilt toward the winter sun, the amount of energy available daily is small, so the job will still take one to two more months to complete.
This portion of the work in progress looks toward the north. "Husband Hill," which Spirit was climbing a year ago, is on the horizon near the center. "Home Plate" is a between that hill and the rover's current position. Wheel tracks imprinted when Spirit drove south from Home Plate can be seen crossing the middle distance of the image from the center to the right.
This view is presented in false color to emphasize differences among rock and soil materials. It combines exposures taken through three of the panoramic camera's filters, centered on wavelengths of 750 nanometers, 530 nanometers and 430 nanometers.
This view of layers around the edge of a low plateau called "Home Plate" inside Mars' Gusev Crater includes a feature that may be what geologists call a "bomb sag" and interpret as evidence of an explosive event, such as a volcanic eruption.
The layers seen here are generally straight and parallel except in the lower right, where they dip around a greyish rock that is about 4 centimeters (about 1.5 inches) in diameter. When layered deposits are struck by a falling rock while the layers are still soft, this type of pattern can be created. The rock might have been lofted by a volcanic burst or as part of the material ejected by the crater-forming impact of a meteorite.
The panoramic camera (Pancam) on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit acquired the exposures for this image on Spirit's 754th Martian day (Feb. 15, 2006). This view is an approximately true-color rendering mathematically generated from separate images taken through all of the left Pancam's 432-nanometer to 753-nanometer filters.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity climbed out of "Endurance Crater" during the rover's 315th sol (Dec. 12, 2004), and used its rear hazard-avoidance camera to look out across the plains south of the crater. After Opportunity examines the nearby heat shield that protected it during its descent through Mars' atmosphere, the rover team plans to drive the rover south to a rugged region described as etched terrain.
27 August 2004
This Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) image shows a landslide deposit in a deep trough in Terra Sirenum near 26.1°S, 140.0°W. After the landslide occurred, subsequent erosion of the slope produced talus that covers part of the landslide deposit. This area is about 3 km (1.9 mi) across; sunlight illuminates the scene from the lower left.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity set a one-day distance record for martian driving on the rover's 383rd martian day, or sol, which began on Feb. 19, 2005. Opportunity rolled 177.5 meters (582 feet) across the plain of Meridiani on that sol. It used its navigation camera after the drive to take the images that are combined into this mosaic view. The view is presented here in a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
A close-up look at the surface of a rock called "Wopmay," inside "Endurance Crater," shows crevices and spherical concretions. The view combines four frames taken by the microscopic imager on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity during the rover's 259th martian day (Oct. 15, 2004). The area shown is about 6 centimeters (2.4 inches) across. This location on Wopmay was given the informal target name "Twin Otter."
Left-eye view of a stereo pair for PIA08778
A drive of about 30 meters (about 100 feet) on the 950th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity's exploration of Mars' Meridiani Planum region (Sept. 25, 2006) brought the NASA rover to within about 20 meters (about 66 feet) of the rim of "Victoria Crater." From that position, the rover's navigation camera took the exposures combined into this stereo anaglyph, which appears three-dimensional when viewed through red-green glasses. The scalloped shape of the crater is visible on the left edge. Due to a small dune or ripple close to the nearest part of the rim, the scientists and engineers on the rover team planned on sol 951 to drive to the right of the ripple, but not quite all the way to the rim, then to proceed to the rim the following sol. The image is presented in cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
Victoria Crater is about 800 meters (one-half mile) in diameter, about five times wider than "Endurance Crater," which Opportunity spent six months examining in 2004, and about 40 times wider than "Eagle Crater," where Opportunity first landed. The great lure of Victoria is the expectation that a thick stack of geological layers will be exposed in the crater walls, potentially several times the thickness that was previously studied at Endurance and therefore, potentially preserving several times the historical record.
Clouds above the rim of "Endurance Crater" in this image from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity can remind the viewer that Mars, our celestial neighbor, is subject to weather. On Earth, clouds like these would be referred to as "cirrus" or the aptly nicknamed "mares' tails." These clouds occur in a region of strong vertical shear. The cloud particles (ice in this martian case) fall out, and get dragged along away from the location where they originally condensed, forming characteristic streamers. Opportunity took this picture with its navigation camera during the rover's 269th martian day (Oct. 26, 2004).
The mission's atmospheric science team is studying cloud observations to deduce seasonal and time-of-day behavior of the clouds. This helps them gain a better understanding of processes that control cloud formation.
NASA's Mars Rover Spirit has been analyzing sulfur-rich rocks and surface materials in the "Columbia Hills" in Gusev Crater on Mars. This image of a very soft, nodular, layered rock nicknamed "Peace" in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. shows a 4.5-centimeter-wide (1.8-inch-wide) hole Spirit ground into the surface with the rover's rock abrasion tool. The high sulfur content of the rock measured by Spirit's alpha particle X-ray spectrometer and its softness measured by the abrasion tool are probably evidence of past alteration by water. Spirit's panoramic camera took this image on martian day, or sol, 381 (Jan. 27, 2005). The image represents the panoramic camera team's best current attempt at generating a true color view of what this scene would look like if viewed by a human on Mars. The image was generated from a combination of six calibrated, left-eye Pancam images acquired through filters ranging from 430-nanometer to 750-nanometer wavelengths.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity climbed out of "Victoria Crater" following the tracks it had made when it descended into the 800-meter-diameter (half-mile-diameter) bowl nearly a year earlier.
The rover's navigation camera captured this view back into the crater just after finishing a 6.8-meter (22-foot) drive that brought Opportunity out onto level ground during the mission's 1,634th Martian day, or sol (Aug. 28, 2008).
The rover laid down the first tracks at this entry and exit point during its 1,291st sol (Sept. 11, 2007), after about a year of exploring around the outside of Victoria Crater for the best access route to the interior. On that sol, Opportunity drove a short distance into the crater and then backed out to check that the footing was good enough to trust this point as an exit route when the work in the crater was finished. Two sols later, Opportunity drove in again for its extended investigation of the rock layers exposed inside the crater.
While inside, the rover spent several months using the contact instruments on its robotic arm to analyze the composition of the rock layers it could drive across on the surface of the upper slope. Then Opportunity drove close to the base of the "Cape Verde" promontory that forms part of the crater rim and appears in the upper center of this image. From that perspective, the rover used its panoramic camera to examine details of layering in the 6-meter-tall (20-foot-tall) cliff.
For scale, the distance between the parallel tracks left by the rover's wheels is about 1 meter (39 inches) from the middle of one track to the middle of the other. After getting past the top of the inner slope of the crater, the Sol 1634 drive also got through a sand ripple where the tracks appear deepest.
Voir l'image PIA11056: Looking Back at Arena of Exploration sur le site de la NASA.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit brushed the dust away from a rock target on an outcrop dubbed "Clovis" prior to grinding a hole and conducting mineral studies. This view is a mosaic combining four frames that Spirit took with its microscopic imager on martian sol 214 (Aug. 9, 2004).
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit photographed this scene on the slope of "Husband Hill" during the rover's 369th martian day, or sol (Jan. 5, 2005). The rock at the center of the frame was informally named "Peace." Spirit subsequently inspected the rock with the tools on the rover's robotic arm. This image was taken with the panoramic camera, through the camera's 430-nanometer filter.
This 180-degree panorama shows the southward vista from the location where Spirit is spending its third Martian winter inside Mars' Gusev Crater. The rover's overwintering location is on the northern edge of a low plateau informally called "Home Plate," which is about 80 meters or 260 feet in diameter.
This view combines 168 different exposures taken with Spirit's panoramic Camera (Pancam)—42 pointings with 4 filters at each pointing. Spirit took the first of these frames during the mission's 1,477th Martian day, or sol, (February 28, 2008) two weeks after the rover made its last move to reach the location where it would stop driving for the winter. Solar energy at Gusev Crater is so limited during the Martian winter that Spirit does not generate enough electricity to drive, nor even enough to take many images per day. The last frame for this mosaic was taken on Sol 1599 (July 2, 2008). The rover team plans for Spirit to finish taking images for the northern half of the scene during the Martian spring.
The northwestern edge of Home Plate is visible in the right foreground. The blockier, more sharply shadowed texture there is layered sandstone whose layering is tilted inward toward the edge of the Home Plate platform. A dark rock on top of Home Plate in that area is a porous volcanic basalt unlike rocks nearby. The northeastern edge of Home Plate is visible in the left foreground. Spirit first climbed onto Home Plate on that region, in early 2006.
Rover tracks from driving by Spirit are visible on Home plate in the center and right of the image. These were made during Spirit's second exploration on top of the plateau, which began when Spirit climbed onto the southern edge of Home Plate in September, 2007.
In the center foreground, the turret of tools at the end of Spirit's robotic arm appears in duplicate because the arm was repositioned between the days when the images making up that part of the mosaic were taken.
On the horizon, the highest point is "McCool Hill." This is one of the seven larger hills in the Columbia Hills range. Home Plate is in the inner basin of the range, between McCool Hill to the south and "Husband Hill" to the north. To the right of McCool Hill, in the center of the image and closer to Home Plate, is a smaller hill capped with a light-toned outcrop. This hill is called "Von Braun," and it is a possible destination the rover team has discussed for the next season of driving by Spirit, after the solar energy level increases in the Martian spring. The flat horizon in the right-hand portion of the panorama is the basaltic plain onto which Spirit landed on Jan. 4, 2004.
This is an approximate true-color, red-green-blue composite panorama generated from images taken through the Pancam's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer filters. This "natural color" view is the rover team's best estimate of what the scene would look like if we were there and able to see it with our own eyes.
Voir l'image PIA11051: Southern Half of Spirit's 'Bonestell' Panorama sur le site de la NASA.
Researchers used a special imaging technique with the panoramic camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity to get as detailed a look as possible at a target region near eastern foot of "Burns Cliff." The intervening terrain was too difficult for driving the rover closer. The target is the boundary between two sections of layered rock. The layers in lower section (left) run at a marked angle to the layers in next higher section (right).
This view is the product of a technique called super resolution. It was generated from data acquired on sol 288 of Opportunity's mission (Nov. 14, 2004) from a position along the southeast wall of "Endurance Crater." Resolution slightly higher than normal for the panoramic camera was synthesized for this view by combining 17 separate images of this scene, each one "dithered" or pointed slightly differently from the previous one. Computer manipulation of the individual images was then used to generate a new synthetic view of the scene in a process known mathematically as iterative deconvolution, but referred to informally as super resolution. Similar methods have been used to enhance the resolution of images from the Mars Pathfinder mission and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Close-up examination of a freshly exposed area of a rock called "Uchben" in the "Columbia Hills" of Mars reveals an assortment of particle shapes and sizes in the rock's makeup. NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit used its microscopic imager during the rover's 286th martian day (Oct. 22, 2004) to take the frames assembled into this view. The view covers a circular hole ground into a target spot called "Koolik" on Uchben by the rover's rock abrasion tool. The circle is 4.5 centimeters (1.8 inches) in diameter. Particles in the rock vary in shape from angular to round, and range in size from about 0.5 millimeter (0.2 inch) to too small to be seen. This assortment suggests that the rock originated from particles that had not been transported much by wind or water, because such a transport process would likely have resulted in more sorting of the particles by size and shape.
This animated piece illustrates the recent escape of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity from dangerous, loose material on the vast plains leading to the rover's next long-term target, "Victoria Crater."
A series of images of the rover's right front wheel, taken by the front hazard-avoidance camera, make up this brief movie. It chronicles the challenge Opportunity faced to free itself from a ripple dubbed "Jammerbugt." The rover's wheels became partially embedded in the ripple at the end of a drive on Opportunity's 833rd Martian day, or sol (May 28, 2006). The images in this clip were taken on sols 836 through 841 (May 31 through June 5, 2006).
Scientists and engineers who had been elated at the meters of progress the rover had been making in earlier drives were happy for even centimeters of advance per sol as they maneuvered their explorer through the slippery material of Jammerbugt. The wheels reached solid footing on a rock outcrop on the final sol of this sequence.
The science and engineering teams appropriately chose the ripple's informal from name the name of a bay on the north coast of Denmark. Jammerbugt, or Jammerbugten, loosely translated, means Bay of Lamentation or Bay of Wailing. The shipping route from the North Sea to the Baltic passes Jammerbugt on its way around the northern tip of Jutland. This has always been an important trade route and many ships still pass by the bay. The prevailing wind directions are typically northwest to southwest with the strongest winds and storms tending to blow from the northwest. A northwesterly wind will blow straight into the Jammerbugt, towards shore. Therefore, in the age of sail, many ships sank there during storms. The shore is sandy, but can have strong waves, so running aground was very dangerous even though there are no rocks.
Fortunately, Opportunity weathered its "Jammerbugt" and is again on its way toward Victoria Crater.
Click on the image for Still Giving Thanks for Good Health (QTVR)
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit took this full-circle panorama of the region near "Husband Hill" (the peak just to the left of center) over the Thanksgiving holiday, before ascending farther. Both the Spirit and Opportunity rovers are still going strong, more than a year after landing on Mars.
This 360-degree view combines 243 images taken by Spirit's panoramic camera over several martian days, or sols, from sol 318 (Nov. 24, 2004) to sol 325 (Dec. 2, 2004). It is an approximately true-color rendering generated from images taken through the camera's 750-, 530-, and 480-nanometer filters. The view is presented here in a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
Spirit is now driving up the slope of Husband Hill along a path about one-quarter of the way from the left side of this mosaic.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit used its navigation camera to take the images combined into this 360-degree view of the rover's surroundings on Spirit's 388th martian day, or sol (Feb. 4, 2005). Spirit had driven about 13 meters (43 feet) uphill toward "Cumberland Ridge" on this sol. This location is catalogued as Spirit's Site 102, Position 513. The view is presented in a cylindrical projection with geometric and brightness seam correction.
This view from where Spirit stood on its 149th martian day (June 3, 2004) shows, on the hillside at the center of the image, the terrain that the rover is crossing six months later. The view is a mosaic of several frames taken with Spirit's panoramic camera.
Spirit Journey Continues at "Husband Hill"
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has left the "West Spur" of the "Columbia Hills" and crossed a flatter saddle to the main body of "Husband Hill." The rover's course from the 313th to 330th martian days, or sols, of its mission (Nov. 19 to Dec. 6, 2004) is indicated on a mosaic view made from images taken with Spirit's panoramic camera on sol 149 (June 3, 2004).
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit takes a good look around at its surroundings high above Gusev Crater as mission planners prepare for solar conjunction on sol 244 (Sept. 9, 2004). On this day, and over the next 11 days, the rover will be out of reach as the Sun moves between Earth and Mars, blocking communications. Scientists are currently discussing potential light-duty assignments that may involve taking images of surrounding terrain, recording wind patterns in the dust, or completing scientific analysis of dust collected on the rover's magnets. Otherwise, Spirit will essentially be on vacation until sol 255 (Sept. 20, 2004).
Dominating the left side of this image, to the east, is the high point of the "West Spur" region of the "Columbia Hills," where Spirit has been exploring rock outcrops since June. On the right side, northwest of the rover's present location, are Spirit's tracks leading up the slope. Dark areas show wheel tracks created when Spirit slipped a bit while negotiating the outcrops. Beyond that, sand dunes on the floor of Gusev Crater can be seen. About one-third of the way across the image from the right is the outcrop dubbed "Longhorn," above the rock dubbed "Clovis," where Spirit used its rock abrasion tool to grind the deepest hole to date on Mars. Just to the left of the middle of this image, a short distance beneath the summit, is a rock outcrop slanting to the left, or north. Spirit will spend the depth of the martian winter there with its solar panels oriented toward the Sun.
Spirit's navigation camera took the images that make up this mosaic from a position labeled Site 86 on sols 228 to 230 (Aug. 23 to Aug. 25, 2004). The 360-degree view is presented in a cylindrical projection with geometrical seam correction.
This image superimposes an artist's concept of the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity on the rim of Victoria Crater. It is done to give a sense of scale.
As NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity continues to traverse from "Erebus Crater" toward "Victoria Crater," the rover navigates along exposures of bedrock between large, wind-blown ripples. Along the way, scientists have been studying fields of cobbles that sometimes appear on trough floors between ripples. They have also been studying the banding patterns seen in large ripples.
This view, obtained by Opportunity's panoramic camera on the rover's 802nd Martian day (sol) of exploration (April 27, 2006), is a mosaic spanning about 30 degrees. It shows a field of cobbles nestled among wind-driven ripples that are about 20 centimeters (8 inches) high.
The origin of cobble fields like this one is unknown. The cobbles may be a lag of coarser material left behind from one or more soil deposits whose finer particles have blown away. The cobbles may be eroded fragments of meteoritic material, secondary ejecta of Mars rock thrown here from craters elsewhere on the surface, weathering remnants of locally-derived bedrock, or a mixture of these. Scientists will use the panoramic camera's multiple filters to study the rock types, variability and origins of the cobbles.
This is a false-color rendering that combines separate images taken through the panoramic camera's 753-nanometer, 535-nanometer and 432-nanometer filters. The false color is used to enhance differences between types of materials in the rocks and soil.
Left-eye view of a stereo pair for PIA08776
A drive of about 60 meters (about 200 feet) on the 943rd Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity's exploration of Mars' Meridiani Planum region (Sept. 18, 2006) brought the NASA rover to within about 50 meters (about 160 feet) of the rim of "Victoria Crater." This crater has been the mission's long-term destination for the past 21 Earth months. Opportunity reached a location from which the cameras on top of the rover's mast could begin to see into the interior of Victoria. This stereo anaglyph was made from frames taken on sol 943 by the panoramic camera (Pancam) to offer a three-dimensional view when seen through red-blue glasses. It shows the upper portion of interior crater walls facing toward Opportunity from up to about 850 meters (half a mile) away. The amount of vertical relief visible at the top of the interior walls from this angle is about 15 meters (about 50 feet). The exposures were taken through a Pancam filter selecting wavelengths centered on 750 nanometers.
Victoria Crater is about five times wider than "Endurance Crater," which Opportunity spent six months examining in 2004, and about 40 times wider than "Eagle Crater," where Opportunity first landed. The great lure of Victoria is the expectation that a thick stack of geological layers will be exposed in the crater walls, potentially several times the thickness that was previously studied at Endurance and therefore, potentially preserving several times the historical record.
First 414 Sols at 'Victoria Crater'
"Victoria Crater," about 800 meters (one-half mile) in diameter, has been home ground for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity for more 14 of the rover's first 46 months on Mars. This view shows the rover's path overlaid on an image of the crater taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Opportunity first reached the crater's rim on Sept. 27, 2006, during the 951st Martian day, or sol, of the rover's work in the Meridian Planum region of Mars. The rover then explored clockwise about one-fourth of the way around the rim before returning to a point close to its first overlook. On the mission's 1,293rd sol (Sept. 13, 2007), Opportunity began a sustained exploration of the interior of the crater, entering at an alcove called "Duck Bay" on the western side of Victoria.
This traverse map includes Opportunity's route though Sol 1,365 (Nov. 26, 2007). The scale bar is 300 meters (984 feet) long.
Voir l'image PIA08813: 'Victoria Crater' at Meridiani Planum sur le site de la NASA.
Approaching its 47th month of a Mars surface mission originally planned to last three months, NASA's Spirit rover was also approaching the northern edge of a low plateau called "Home Plate." The rover's operators selected an area with north-facing slope there as a destination where Spirit would have its best chance of surviving low-solar-energy conditions of oncoming Martian winter.
The yellow line on this map of the Home Plate area indicates Spirit's route from early February 2006, entering the mapped area from the north (top), to late November 2007, on the western edge of the bright-toned Home Plate plateau. The map covers an area about 160 meters (525 feet) across from west to east. Labels indicate the area intended for Spirit to spend many months spanning the rover's third Martian winter, the site where it spent about seven months (April to November 2006) spanning its second winter, and the site where it lost use of the drive motor for one of its six wheels.
A north-facing slope helps Spirit maximizes electric output from its solar panels during winter months because Spirit is in the southern hemisphere of Mars, so the sun appears only in the northern sky during winter. For the third winter, which will reach its minimum solar-energy days in early June 2008, Spirit faces the challenge of having more dust on its solar panels than it had during its second winter.
The base image for this map is a portion of a color image taken on Jan. 9, 2007, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Voir l'image PIA10127: Heading for Next Winter Haven sur le site de la NASA.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity took this image with its panoramic camera when the rover was about 130 meters (427 feet) from its heat shield, during the rover's 322nd sol (Dec. 19, 2004). The protective device shielded the rover from intense frictional heat as it entered the martian atmosphere. The heat shield was shed during the descent and landing sequence, just before the rover (within its folded lander) was lowered on a bridle. Scientists and engineers are interested in seeing what effects the descent had on the heat shield and are directing Opportunity to examine it.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity captured this vista of "Victoria Crater" from the viewpoint of "Cape Verde," one of the promontories that are part of the scalloped rim of the crater. Opportunity drove onto Cape Verde shortly after arriving at the rim of Victoria in September 2006. The view combines hundreds of exposures taken by the rover's panoramic camera (Pancam). The camera began taking the component images during Opportunity's 970th Martian day, or sol, on Mars (Oct. 16, 2006). Work on the panorama continued through the solar conjunction period, when Mars was nearly behind the sun from Earth's perspective and communications were minimized. Acquisition of images for this panorama was completed on Opportunity's 991st sol (Nov. 7, 2006).
The top of Cape Verde is in the immediate foreground at the center of the image. To the left and right are two of the more gradually sloped bays that alternate with the cliff-faced capes or promontories around the rim of the crater. "Duck Bay," where Opportunity first reached the rim, is to the right. Beyond Duck Bay counterclockwise around the rim, the next promontory is "Cabo Frio," about 150 meters (500 feet) from the rover. On the left side of the panorama is "Cape St. Mary," the next promontory clockwise from Cape Verde and about 40 meters (130 feet) from the rover. The vantage point atop Cape Verde offered a good view of the rock layers in the cliff face of Cape St. Mary, which is about 15 meters or 50 feet tall. By about two weeks after the Pancam finished collecting the images for this panorama, Opportunity had driven to Cape St. Mary and was photographing Cape Verde's rock layers.
The far side of the crater lies about 800 meters (half a mile) away, toward the southeast.
This view combines images taken through three of the Pancam's filters, admitting light with wavelengths centered at 750 nanometers (near infrared), 530 nanometers (green) and 430 nanometers (violet). It is presented in false color to emphasize differences among materials in the rocks and soils.
The right rear wheel of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity makes slow but steady progress through soft dune material in this movie clip of frames taken by the rover's rear hazard identification camera over a period of several days. The wheel is largely hidden by a cable bundle. The sequence starts on Opportunity's 460th martian day, or sol (May 10, 2005) and ends 11 days later. In eight drives during that period, Opportunity advanced a total of 26 centimeters (10 inches) while spinning its wheels enough to have driven 46 meters (151 feet) if there were no slippage. The motion appears to speed up near the end of the clip, but that is an artifact of individual frames being taken less frequently.
This image from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows the remains of the rover's heat shield, broken into two key pieces, the main piece on the left side and a broken-off flank piece near the middle of the image. The heat shield impact site is identified by the circle of red dust on the right side of the picture. In this view, Opportunity is approximately 20 meters (66 feet) away from the heat shield, which protected it while hurtling through the martian atmosphere.
In the far left of the image, a meteorite called "Heat Shield Rock," sits nearby, The Sun is reflecting off the silver-colored underside of the internal thermal blankets of the heat shield.
The rover spent 36 sols investigating how the severe heating during entry through the atmosphere affected the heat shield. The most obvious is the fact that the heat shield inverted upon impact.
This is an approximately true-color rendering of the scene acquired around 1:22 p.m. local solar time on Opportunity sol 324 (Dec. 21, 2004) in an image mosaic using panoramic filters at wavelengths of 750, 530, and 430 nanometers.
This movie clip shows a large, distant dust devil -- a whirlwind that lofts dust into the air -- as a dark shape on the horizon near the right side of the images. This dust devil was about 5 kilometers (3 miles) away from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, and may have been up to 200 meters or yards in diameter. Smaller dust devils closer to the rover appear bright against the dark ground. Spirit's navigation camera took these images on the rover's 468th martian day, or sol (April 27, 2005.) Contrast has been enhanced for anything in the images that changes from frame to frame, that is, for the dust devil. The number of seconds elapsed since the first frame is indicated at lower left of the images, typically 20 seconds between frames.
Scientists expected dust devils since before Spirit landed. The landing area inside Gusev Crater is filled with dark streaks left behind when dust devils pick dust up from an area. It is also filled with bright "hollows," which are dust-filled miniature craters. Dust covers most of the terrain. Winds flow into and out of Gusev crater every day. The Sun heats the surface so that the surface is warm to the touch even though the atmosphere at 2 meters (6 feet) above the surface would be chilly. That temperature contrast causes convection. Mixing the dust, winds, and convection can trigger dust devils.
This image from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity features a cross section through the structure and thermal protection system of the rover's heat shield. Shown is one of six separation fittings used to join and separate the heat shield from the backshell during atmospheric entry, descent, and landing. Upon impact, this separation fitting punched through the structure.
This is an approximately true-color rendering of the scene acquired around 1:21 p.m. local solar time on Opportunity's sol 340 (Jan. 7, 2005) using panoramic camera filters at wavelengths of 750, 530, and 430 nanometers.
From its winter outpost at "Low Ridge" inside Gusev Crater, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit took this spectacular, color mosaic of hilly, sandy terrain and two potential iron meteorites. The two light-colored, smooth rocks about two-thirds of the way up from the bottom of the frame have been labeled "Zhong Shan" and "Allan Hills."
The two rocks' informal names are in keeping with the rover science team's campaign to nickname rocks and soils in the area after locations in Antarctica. Zhong Shang is an Antarctic base that the People's Republic of China opened on Feb. 26, 1989, at the Larsemann Hills in Prydz Bay in East Antarctica. Allan Hills is a location where researchers have found many Martian meteorites, including the controversial ALH84001, which achieved fame in 1996 when NASA scientists suggested that it might contain evidence for fossilized extraterrestrial life. Zhong Shan was the given name of Dr. Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), known as the "Father of Modern China." Born to a peasant family in Guangdong, Sun moved to live with his brother in Honolulu at age 13 and later became a medical doctor. He led a series of uprisings against the Qing dynasty that began in 1894 and eventually succeeded in 1911. Sun served as the first provisional president when the Republic of China was founded in 1912.
The Zhong Shan and Allan Hills rocks, at the left and right, respectively, have unusual morphologies and miniature thermal emission spectrometer signatures that resemble those of a rock known as "Heat Shield" at the Meridiani site explored by Spirit's twin, Opportunity. Opportunity's analyses revealed Heat Shield to be an iron meteorite.
Spirit acquired this false-color image on the rover's 872nd Martian day, or sol (June 16, 2006), using exposures taken through three of the panoramic camera's filters, centered on wavelengths of 750 nanometers, 530 nanometers, and 430 nanometers. The image is presented in false color to emphasize differences among materials in the rocks and soil.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit used its panoramic camera to take this image of a rock called "Lutefisk" on the rover's 286th martian day (Oct. 22, 2004). The surface of the rock is studded with rounded granules of apparently more-resistant material up to several millimeters (0.1 inch) or more across. The visible portion of Lutefisk is about 25 centimeters (10 inches) across.
As it finished its second Martian year on Mars, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit was beginning to examine a group of angular rocks given informal names corresponding to peaks in the Colorado Rockies. A Martian year— the amount of time it takes Mars to complete one orbit around the sun—lasts for 687 Earth days. Spirit completed its second Martian year on the rover's 1,338th Martian day, or sol, corresponding to Oct. 8, 2007.
Two days later, on sol 1,340 (Oct. 10, 2007), Spirit used its front hazard-identification camera to capture this wide-angle view of its robotic arm extended to a rock informally named "Humboldt Peak." For the rocks at this site on the southern edge of the "Home Plate" platform in the inner basin of the Columbia Hills inside Gusev Crater, the rover team decided to use names of Colorado peaks higher than 14,000 feet. The Colorado Rockies team of the National League is the connection to the baseball-theme nomenclature being used for features around Home Plate.
The tool facing Spirit on the turret at the end of the robotic arm is the Moessbauer spectrometer.
This movie clip shows several gusts and whirlwinds carrying dust as they move toward NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. It consists of frames taken by the navigation camera on Spirit during the afternoon of the rover's 501st martian day, or sol (May 31, 2005). The camera was facing into the wind. Contrast has been enhanced for anything in the images that changes from frame to frame, that is, for the dust moved by wind.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity captured this vista of "Victoria Crater" from the viewpoint of "Cape Verde," one of the promontories that are part of the scalloped rim of the crater. Opportunity drove onto Cape Verde shortly after arriving at the rim of Victoria in September 2006. The view combines hundreds of exposures taken by the rover's panoramic camera (Pancam). The camera began taking the component images during Opportunity's 970th Martian day, or sol, on Mars (Oct. 16, 2006). Work on the panorama continued through the solar conjunction period, when Mars was nearly behind the sun from Earth's perspective and communications were minimized. Acquisition of images for this panorama was completed on Opportunity's 991st sol (Nov. 7, 2006).
The top of Cape Verde is in the immediate foreground at the center of the image. To the left and right are two of the more gradually sloped bays that alternate with the cliff-faced capes or promontories around the rim of the crater. "Duck Bay," where Opportunity first reached the rim, is to the right. Beyond Duck Bay counterclockwise around the rim, the next promontory is "Cabo Frio," about 150 meters (500 feet) from the rover. On the left side of the panorama is "Cape St. Mary," the next promontory clockwise from Cape Verde and about 40 meters (130 feet) from the rover. The vantage point atop Cape Verde offered a good view of the rock layers in the cliff face of Cape St. Mary, which is about 15 meters or 50 feet tall. By about two weeks after the Pancam finished collecting the images for this panorama, Opportunity had driven to Cape St. Mary and was photographing Cape Verde's rock layers.
The far side of the crater lies about 800 meters (half a mile) away, toward the southeast.
This approximately true-color view combines images taken through three of the Pancam's filters, admitting light with wavelengths centered at 750 nanometers (near infrared), 530 nanometers (green) and 430 nanometers (violet).
Scientists working with NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit decided to examine this rock, dubbed "Wishstone," based on data from the miniature thermal emission spectrometer. That instrument's data indicated that the mineralogy of the rocks in this area is different from that of rocks encountered either on the plains of Gusev Crater or in bedrock outcrops examined so far in the "Columbia Hills" inside the crater. Spirit used its rock abrasion tool first to scour a patch of the rock's surface with a wire brush, then to grind away the surface to reveal interior material. Placement of the rover's alpha particle X-ray spectrometer on the exposed circle of interior material revealed that the rock is rich in phosphorus. Spirit used its panoramic camera during the rover's 342nd martian day, or sol, (Dec. 18, 2004) to take the three individual images that were combined to produce this false-color view emphasizing the freshly ground dust around the hole cut by the rock abrasion tool.
Unusually Rich in Phosophorus
The graph in figure 1 compares the elemental makeup of a rock dubbed "Wishstone" with the average composition of rocks that Spirit examined on the western spur of the "Columbia Hills." Wishstone lies farther into the hills than that spur. It is richer in phosphorus than any other Mars rock ever examined. Scientists plan to examine other rocks near Wishstone to help explain the significance of the high phosphorus concentration. The vertical scale is the ratio of the concentration of an element in the hills rocks to the concentration of the same element in a typical volcanic rock from the plains that Spirit crossed to reach the hills.
This overview of "Endurance Crater" traces the path of the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity from sol 94 (April 29, 2004) to sol 205 (August 21, 2004). The route charted to enter the crater was a bit circuitous, but well worth the extra care engineers took to ensure the rover's safety. On sol 94, Opportunity sat on the edge of this impressive, football field-sized crater while rover team members assessed the scene. After traversing around the "Karatepe" region and past "Burns Cliff," the rover engineering team assessed the possibility of entering the crater. Careful analysis of the angles Opportunity would face, including testing an Earth-bound model on simulated martian terrain, led the team to decide against entering the crater at that particular place. Opportunity then backed up before finally dipping into the crater on its 130th sol (June 5, 2004). The rover has since made its way down the crater's inner slope, grinding, trenching and examining fascinating rocks and soil targets along the way. The rover nearly made it to the intriguing dunes at the bottom of the crater, but when it got close, the terrain did not look safe enough to cross.
In this movie clip, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit moves its robotic arm, called the instrument deployment device, to take a series of images with the rover's microscopic imager during the rover's 469th martian day, or sol (April 28, 2005). The images making up this clip were taken by Spirit's left front hazard identification camera. The arm's carefully planned motions positioned the microscopic imager to take an array of 24 images of this rock target, dubbed "Keystone," at an outcrop called "Methuselah." The microscopic imager frames were combined into a mosaic view PIA07977 showing the finely laminated texture of the rock.
On sol 1149 (March 28, 2007) of its mission, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit caught a wind gust with its navigation camera. A series of navigation camera images were strung together to create this movie. The front of the gust is observable because it was strong enough to lift up dust. From assessing the trajectory of this gust, the atmospheric science team concludes that it is possible that it passed over the rover. There was, however, no noticeable increase in power associated with this gust. In the past, dust devils and gusts have wiped the solar panels of dust, making it easier for the solar panels to absorb sunlight.
This view from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows bedrock within a stratigraphic layer informally named "Gilbert," which is the rover's next target after completing an examination of three stratigraphic layers forming a bright band around the inside of Victoria Crater. The rover will descend deeper into the crater to reach the Gilbert layer.
Opportunity used its panoramic camera (Pancam) to capture this image with low-sun angle at a local solar time of 3:30 p.m. during the rover's 1,429th Martian day, of sol (Jan. 31, 2008).
This view combines separate images taken through the Pancam filters centered on wavelengths of 753 nanometers, 535 nanometers and 432 nanometers. It is presented in a false-color stretch to bring out subtle color differences in the scene.
Voir l'image PIA10239: Opportunity View of 'Gilbert' Layer (False Color) sur le site de la NASA.
Since landing on Mars a year ago, NASA's pair of six-wheeled geologists have been constantly exposed to martian winds and dust. As a result, the Spirit rover has gradually experienced a slight decline in power as a thin layer of dust has accumulated on the solar panels, blocking some of the sunlight that is converted to electricity. In this enlarged image of a postage-stamp-size (3-centimeter-square, 1.2-inch-square) portion of one of Spirit's solar panels, a fine layer of martian dust coats electrical connections and metal surfaces. Individual silt grains or clumps of dust are visible where sediment has accumulated in crevices between solar cells and circuits. The upper right half of the image shows the edge of one of the rover's solar cells. The lower left half shows electrical wires bonded with silicon adhesive to the underlying composite surface; the circular abrasions are the result of sanding by hand on Earth. The braided wire is connected to a thermocouple used to measure temperature based on electrical resistance. Spirit took this image with its microscopic imager on martian day, or sol, 350 (Dec. 26, 2004).
As part of its investigation of "Victoria Crater," NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity examined a promontory called "Cape St. Mary" from the from the vantage point of "Cape Verde," the next promontory counterclockwise around the crater's deeply scalloped rim. This view of Cape St. Mary combines several exposures taken by the rover's panoramic camera into an approximately true-color mosaic with contrast adjusted to improve the visibility of details in shaded areas.
The upper portion of the crater wall contains a jumble of material tossed outward by the impact that excavated the crater. This vertical cross-section through the blanket of ejected material surrounding the crater was exposed by erosion that expanded the crater outward from its original diameter, according to scientists' interpretation of the observations. Below the jumbled material in the upper part of the wall are layers that survive relatively intact from before the crater-causing impact. Near the base of the Cape St. Mary cliff are layers with a pattern called "crossbedding," intersecting with each other at angles, rather than parallel to each other. Large-scale crossbedding can result from material being deposited as wind-blown dunes.
The images combined into this mosaic were taken during the 970th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity's Mars-surface mission (Oct. 16, 2006). The panoramic camera took them through the camera's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer filters.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit made daily progress in early December 2007 toward the northern edge of a low plateau called "Home Plate." The rover's operators selected an area with north-facing slope there (indicated by the blue-outlined rectangle) as a destination where Spirit would have its best chance of surviving low-solar-energy conditions of oncoming Martian winter.
As indicated by the yellow line tracing the path Spirit has driven, the rover was near the western edge of the plateau on Sol (Martian day) 1,390 of the mission (Nov. 30, 2007), but nearing the northern edge by Sol 1,397 (Dec. 8, 2007).
A north-facing slope helps Spirit maximizes electric output from its solar panels during winter months because Spirit is in the southern hemisphere of Mars, so the sun appears only in the northern sky during winter. For the third winter, which will reach its minimum solar-energy days in early June 2008, Spirit faces the challenge of having more dust on its solar panels than it had during its second winter.
The base image for this map is a portion of a color image taken on Jan. 9, 2007, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Voir l'image PIA10129: Spirit Nears North-Tilting Site for Winter Haven sur le site de la NASA.
As part of its investigation of "Victoria Crater," NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity examined a section of the scalloped rim called "Bottomless Bay" (or "Bahia sin Fondo"). This view shows the northeastern side of Bottomless Bay as seen from the southwest. The exposures combined into this mosaic were taken by the rover's panoramic camera through a 750-nanometer filter during the 1,019th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity's Mars-surface mission (Dec. 5, 2006). Contrast has been altered to improve the visibility of details in shadowed areas.
This movie clip shows a several dust devils -- whirlwinds that loft dust into the air -- moving across a plain below the hillside vantage point of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. Several of the dust devils are visible at once in some of the 21 frames in this sequence. The local solar time was about 2 p.m., when the ground temperature was high enough to cause turbulence that kicks up dust devils as the wind blows across the plain. The number of seconds elapsed since the first frame is indicated at lower left of the images, typically 20 seconds between frames. Spirit's navigation camera took these images on the rover's 461st martian day, or sol (April 20, 2005.) Contrast has been enhanced for anything in the images that changes from frame to frame, that is, for the dust devil.
Scientists expected dust devils since before Spirit landed. The landing area inside Gusev Crater is filled with dark streaks left behind when dust devils pick dust up from an area. It is also filled with bright "hollows," which are dust-filled miniature craters. Dust covers most of the terrain. Winds flow into and out of Gusev crater every day. The Sun heats the surface so that the surface is warm to the touch even though the atmosphere at 2 meters (6 feet) above the surface would be chilly. That temperature contrast causes convection. Mixing the dust, winds, and convection can trigger dust devils.
In time to survive the Martian winter, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has driven to and parked on a north-facing slope in the "Columbia Hills." This vantage point will optimize solar power during the upcoming winter season and maximize the vehicle's ability to communicate with the NASA Odyssey orbiter.
Top science priorities for the coming months are a detailed, 360-degree panorama using all 13 filters of the panoramic camera, a study of surface and subsurface soil properties, and monitoring of the atmosphere and its changes. The planned subsurface soil experiments will be a first for the Mars Exploration Rover mission. To conduct the study, Spirit will use the brush on the rock abrasion tool to carefully sweep away soil, much the way an archaeologist uses a brush to uncover artifacts. At each level, Spirit will measure the mineral and chemical properties and assess the physical nature (such as grain size, texture, hardness) of the material, using the Athena science instruments on the robotic arm. Of particular interest are vertical variations in soil characteristics that may indicate water-related deposition of sulfates and other minerals.
Panoramic images will provide important information about the nature and origin of surrounding rocks and soils. Spirit will also study the mineralogy of the surrounding terrain using the thermal emission spectrometer and search for surface changes caused by high winds. After the winter solstice in August, depending on energy levels, scientists may direct the rover to pivot around the disabled, right front wheel to get different targets within reach of the arm. When the winter season is over and solar energy levels rise again, scientists will direct Spirit to leave its winter campaign site and continue examining the "Columbia Hills."
Spirit acquired the images in this mosaic with the navigation camera on the rover's 807th Martian day, or sol, of exploring Gusev Crater on Mars (April 11, 2006). Approaching from the east are the rover's tracks, including a shallow trench created by the dragging front wheel. On the horizon, in the center of the panorama, is "McCool Hill." This view is presented in a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity recently stopped to analyze an exposure of rock near "Beagle Crater," on a target nicknamed "Baltra." Nearly 100 sols, or Martian days, had passed since Opportunity had last analyzed one of the now-familiar rock exposures seen on the Plains of Meridiani. The rover ground a 3-millimeter-deep (0.12-inch-deep) hole in the rock using the rock abrasion tool on sol 893 (July 29, 2006) while stationed about 25 meters (82 feet) from the southwest rim of Beagle Crater.
Scientists wanted to analyze the outcrop one more time before driving the rover onto the ring of smooth material surrounding "Victoria Crater." Opportunity's analysis showed the rock to be very similar in its elemental composition to other exposures encountered during the rover's southward trek across Meridiani Planum.
Opportunity acquired the image data shown here shortly after noon on Mars on sol 896 (Aug. 1, 2006) with the panoramic camera (Pancam), after backing up 1 meter (3.3 feet) from Baltra to assure that the target was in sunlight. This is an approximately true-color Pancam image, generated from mathematical combinations of calibrated left-eye images using filters ranging from 432-nanometer to 753-nanometer wavelengths.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has been analyzing sulfur-rich rocks and surface materials in the "Columbia Hills" in Gusev Crater on Mars. This image shows rocky debris and dust, which planetary scientists call "regolith" or "soil," that has been churned up by the rover wheels. This 40-centimeter-wide (16-inch-wide) patch of churned-up dirt, nicknamed "Paso Robles," contains brighter patches measured to be high in sulfur by Spirit's alpha particle X-ray Spectrometer. Spirit's panoramic camera took this image on martian day, or sol, 400 (Feb. 16, 2005). The image represents the panoramic camera team's best current attempt at generating a true color view of what this scene would look like if viewed by a human on Mars. The image was generated from a combination of six calibrated, left-eye images acquired through filters ranging from 430-nanometer to 750-nanometer wavelengths.
NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit acquired this mosaic on the mission’s 1,202nd Martian day, or sol (May 21, 2007), while investigating the area east of the elevated plateau known as “Home Plate” in the “Columbia Hills.” The mosaic shows an area of disturbed soil, nicknamed “Gertrude Weise” by scientists, made by Spirit's stuck right front wheel.
The trench exposed a patch of nearly pure silica, with the composition of opal. It could have come from either a hot-spring environment or an environment called a fumarole, in which acidic, volcanic steam rises through cracks. Either way, its formation involved water, and on Earth, both of these types of settings teem with microbial life.
Spirit acquired this mosaic with the panoramic camera’s 753-nanometer, 535-nanometer, and 432-nanometer filters. The view presented here is an approximately true-color rendering.
Voir l'image PIA11758: Rover’s Wheel Churns Up Bright Martian Soil sur le site de la NASA.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has examined the layered structure of this rock, called "Tetl," in the "Columbia Hills." This approximately true-color view was made from frames taken by Spirit's panoramic camera on the rover's 264th martian day (Sept. 29, 2004). The rock is about 25 centimeters (10 inches) long. Spirit used its microscopic imager to inspect the region indicated as MI (Figure 1).
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity took this image during the its 274th martian day, or sol, (Oct. 31, 2004) to provide rover planners with a fresh look at the planned drive direction. The rover is making its way eastward inside "Endurance Crater" toward the base of a steep exposure of layered rock called "Burns Cliff."
After a finishing an in-and-out maneuver to check wheel slippage near the rim of Victoria Crater, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity re-entered the crater during the rover's 1,293rd Martian day, or sol, (Sept. 13, 2007) to begin a weeks-long exploration of the inner slope.
Opportunity's front hazard-identification camera recorded this wide-angle view looking down into and across the crater at the end of the day's drive. The rover's position was about six meters (20 feet) inside the rim, in the "Duck Bay" alcove of the crater.
A cable-tie no more than several centimeters (a few inches) long, resembling the wires used to fasten bags around loaves of bread, has left a trail of streaks in a fine layer of dust on the deck of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. It is the light-toned squiggle shape against a dark background slightly below and to the right of the center of this image. The tie has been sliding around in a containment bowl created by the solar array and the base of the Pancam Mast Assembly since landing day on Jan. 3, 2004. A low-resolution image [see PIA07267] from a few hours after landing shows the tie present on the deck. Engineers speculate that the tie may have sprung loose from the bridle that lowered the rover to the surface of Mars or from the rover, lander, backshell, or parachute can. Together, those components used more than 1,000 cable ties, all sterilized like the rover itself to prevent transfer of contaminants from Earth to Mars. Close inspection of the marks in the dust left by the tie reveals that, much like pictographs on a rock wall, older streaks have been covered with dust, while newer streaks are superimposed on the dust that covers the older streaks. Spirit took this picture with its navigation camera on martian day, or sol, 358 (Jan. 3, 2005).
This hole in a rock dubbed "Clovis" is the deepest hole drilled so far in any rock on Mars. NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this view with its microscopic imager on martian sol 217 (Aug. 12, 2004) after drilling 8.9 millimeters (0.35 inch) into the rock with its rock abrasion tool. The view is a mosaic of four frames taken by the microscopic imager. The hole is 4.5 centimeters (1.8 inches) in diameter. Clovis is key to a developing story about environmental change on Mars, not only because it is among the softest rocks encountered so far in Gusev Crater, but also because it contains mineral alterations that extend relatively deep beneath its surface. In fact, as evidenced by its fairly crumbly texture, it is possibly the most highly altered volcanic rock ever studied on Mars.
Scientific analysis shows that the rock contains higher levels of the elements sulfur, chlorine, and bromine than are normally encountered in basaltic rocks, such as a rock dubbed "Humphrey" that Spirit encountered two months after arriving on Mars. Humphrey showed elevated levels of sulfur, chlorine, and bromine only in the outermost 2 millimeters (less than 0.1 inch) of its surface. Clovis shows elevated levels of the same elements along with the associated softness of the rock within a borehole that is 4 times as deep. Scientists hope to compare Clovis to other, less-altered rocks in the vicinity to assess what sort of water-based processes altered the rock. Hypotheses include transport of sulfur, chlorine, and bromine in water vapor in volcanic gases; hydrothermal circulation (flow of volcanically heated water through rock); or saturation in a briny soup containing the same elements.
In this image, very fine-grained material from the rock has clumped together by electrostatic attraction and fallen into the borehole.
NASA/JPL/Cornell/USGSThis animation is built from images taken by the navigation camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit from the rover's 365th martian day, or sol (Jan. 11, 2005), through sol 390 (Feb. 6, 2005). During this period, Spirit covered about 80 meters (262 feet) in its climb toward "Cumberland Ridge" in the "Columbia Hills." The sequence includes images from all of the sols on which Spirit drove during this period: sols 365, 366, 371, 381, 382, 386, 388 and 390.
Tracks left by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity as it traveled along the rim of Victoria Crater can be seen clearly in this image taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft.
This is a subframe of a larger image that the camera acquired on June 26, 2007. The larger image will be released as HiRISE catalogue number PSP_004289_1780 after geometric processing.
Opportunity first approached Victoria Crater at an alcove informally named "Duck Bay" (see tracks at left). It then drove along the crater's sinuous edge in a clockwise direction before heading back to Duck Bay, where it is expected to enter the crater in early July 2007.
This view of Victoria crater is looking north from "Duck Bay" towards the dramatic promontory called "Cape Verde." The dramatic cliff of layered rocks is about 50 meters (about 165 feet) away from the rover and is about 6 meters (about 20 feet) tall. The taller promontory beyond that is about 100 meters (about 325 feet) away, and the vista beyond that extends away for more than 400 meters (about 1300 feet) into the distance. This is a false color rendering (enhanced to bring out details from within the shadowed regions of the scene) of images taken by the panoramic camera (Pancam) on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity during the rover's 952nd sol, or Martian day, (Sept. 28, 2006) using the camera's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer filters.
As NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity was making its way back toward its original entry path into "Endurance Crater," scientists and engineers spotted what they hoped might be a shortcut for climbing out of the crater. The possible exit path, pictured on the far right of this image where the outcrop is punctuated, was eventually deemed too hazardous for the rover to attempt. Opportunity would have had to cross terrain with a slope of 28 degrees and face a tall rock outcropping very close to the exit chute opening which, itself, is too narrow for the rover to pass. This stereo view combines several frames taken by the rover's navigation camera during Opportunity's 297th sol on Mars (Nov. 24, 2004). It is presented in a cylindrical-perspective projection with geometric seam correction. The location from which the image was taken has been designated as Opportunity's Site 38, Position 97.
Figure 1 is the left-eye view of a stereo pair and Figure 2 is the right-eye view of a stereo pair.
Click on the image for Legacy Panorama on Spirit's Way to 'Bonneville' (QTVR)
This view captured by the panoramic camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit nearly a year ago is called Spirit's "Legacy" panorama. It combines many frames acquired during Spirit's 59th through 61st martian days, or sols (March 3 to 5, 2004) from a position about halfway between the landing site and the rim of "Bonneville Crater." The location is within the transition from the relatively smooth plains to the more rocky and rugged blanket of material ejected from Bonneville by the force of the impact that dug the crater.
The panorama spans 360 degrees and consists of images obtained in 78 individual pointings. The camera took images though 5 different filter at each pointing. This mosaic is an approximately true-color rendering generated using the images acquired through filters centered at wavelengths of 750, 530, and 480 nanometers.
The Columbia Memorial Station lander can be seen about 200 meters (about 650 feet) in the distance by following the rover tracks back toward right of center in the mosaic and zooming in.
As NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity was making its way back toward its original entry path into "Endurance Crater," scientists and engineers spotted what they hoped might be a shortcut for climbing out of the crater. The possible exit path, pictured on the far right of this image where the outcrop is punctuated, was eventually deemed too hazardous for the rover to attempt. Opportunity would have had to cross terrain with a slope of 28 degrees and face a tall rock outcropping very close to the exit chute opening which, itself, is too narrow for the rover to pass. This stereo view combines several frames taken by the rover's navigation camera during Opportunity's 297th sol on Mars (Nov. 24, 2004). It is presented in a cylindrical-perspective projection with geometric seam correction. The location from which the image was taken has been designated as Opportunity's Site 38, Position 97.
NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit acquired this mosaic on the mission’s 1,202nd Martian day, or sol (May 21, 2007), while investigating the area east of the elevated plateau known as “Home Plate” in the “Columbia Hills.” The mosaic shows an area of disturbed soil, nicknamed “Gertrude Weise” by scientists, made by Spirit's stuck right front wheel.
The trench exposed a patch of nearly pure silica, with the composition of opal. It could have come from either a hot-spring environment or an environment called a fumarole, in which acidic, volcanic steam rises through cracks. Either way, its formation involved water, and on Earth, both of these types of settings teem with microbial life.
The image is presented here in false color that is used to bring out subtle differences in color.
Voir l'image PIA11756: Rover’s Wheel Churns Up Bright Martian Soil (False Color) sur le site de la NASA.
This image captured by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows "Cape St. Vincent," one of the many promontories that jut out from the walls of Victoria Crater, Mars. The material at the top of the promontory consists of loose, jumbled rock, then a bit further down into the crater, abruptly transitions to solid bedrock. This transition point is marked by a bright band of rock, visible around the entire crater.
Scientists say this bright band represents what used to be the surface of Mars just before an impact formed Victoria Crater. After Opportunity begins to descend into the crater in early July 2007, it will examine the band carefully at an accessible location with a gentle slope. These investigations might help determine if the band's brighter appearance is the result of ancient interactions with the Martian atmosphere.
This image was taken by Opportunity's panoramic camera on sol 1167 (May 6, 2007). It is presented in false color to accentuate differences in surface materials.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit took this microscopic image of a target called "Bubbles" on a rock called "Champagne" after using its rock abrasion tool to grind a hole through the rock's outer surface. The circular area where the rock's interior is exposed is about 5 centimeters (2 inches) across. This rock is different from rocks out on the plains of Gusev Crater but is similar to other rocks in this area of the "Columbia Hills" in that it rich in phosphorus. Plagioclase, a mineral commonly found in igneous rocks, is also present in these rocks, according to analysis with Spirit's miniature thermal emission spectrometer. By using the rover's alpha particle X-ray spectrometer to collect data for multiple martian days, or sols, scientists are also beginning to get measurements of trace elements in the rocks. Spirit took the images that are combined into this mosaic on sol 358 (Jan. 3, 2005).
This image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity near the rim of "Victoria Crater." Victoria is an impact crater about 800 meters (half a mile) in diameter at Meridiani Planum near the equator of Mars. Opportunity has been operating on Mars since January, 2004. Five days before this image was taken, Opportunity arrived at the rim of Victoria, after a drive of more than 9 kilometers (over 5 miles). It then drove to the position where it is seen in this image.
Shown in the image are "Duck Bay," the eroded segment of the crater rim where Opportunity first arrived at the crater; "Cabo Frio," a sharp promontory to the south of Duck Bay; and "Cape Verde," another promontory to the north. When viewed at the highest resolution, this image shows the rover itself, wheel tracks in the soil behind it, and the rover's shadow, including the shadow of the camera mast. After this image was taken, Opportunity moved to the very tip of Cape Verde to perform more imaging of the interior of the crater.
This view is a portion of an image taken through a red filter by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft on Oct. 3, 2006. The complete image is centered at minus7.8 degrees latitude, 279.5 degrees East longitude. The range to the target site was 297 kilometers (185.6 miles). At this distance the image scale is 29.7 centimeters (12 inches) per pixel (with 1 x 1 binning) so objects about 89 centimeters (35 inches) across are resolved. North is up. The image was taken at a local Mars time of 3:30 PM and the scene is illuminated from the west with a solar incidence angle of 59.7 degrees, thus the sun was about 30.3 degrees above the horizon. At a solar longitude of 113.6 degrees, the season on Mars is northern summer.
For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, http://www.nasa.gov.
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems is the prime contractor for the project and built the spacecraft. The HiRISE camera was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation and is operated by the University of Arizona.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity took a detailed look at what was once the exterior of its heat shield. Hitting the martian surface inverted the heat shield, making it difficult to photograph the outside where evidence of any atmospheric effects may be found.
Engineers sought this image to help determine how the heat shield weathered the intense frictional heat created as it passed through the martian atmosphere.
This is an approximately true-color rendering of the scene acquired around 12:47 p.m. local solar time on Opportunity's sol 344 (Jan. 11, 2005) using panoramic camera filters at wavelengths of 750, 530, and 430 nanometers.
This image taken by the panoramic camera on the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows the view of Victoria Crater from Duck Bay. Opportunity reached Victoria Crater on Sol 951 (September 27, 2006) after traversing 9.28 kilometers (5.77 miles) since her landing site at Eagle Crater. Victoria Crater is roughly 800 meters (one-half mile) wide -- about five times wider than Endurance Crater, and 40 times as wide as Eagle crater. The south face of the 6 meter (20 foot) tall layered Cape Verde promontory can be seen in the left side of the inner crater wall, about 50 meters (about 165 feet) away from the rover at the time of the imaging. The north face of the 15 meter (50 foot) tall stack of layered rocks called Cabo Frio can be seen on the right side of the inner crater wall.
This mosaic was taken on Sols 952 and 953 (September 28 and 29, 2006). There are 30 separate pointings through 6 different filters at each pointing. This mosaic was generated from Pancam's 753 nm, 535 nm, and 482 nm filters. Four versions are available at full resolution: this approximate true color rendering, a false color stretch to enhance subtle color differences in the scene, a stereo anaglyph, which appears three dimensional when viewed through red-blue glasses, and a black and white version presented as a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
A portion of an exposure of bedrock dubbed "Larry's Outcrop" shows little layering in this view, in contrast to nearby outcrops called "Methuselah" and "Jibsheet." NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit used its panoramic camera in May 2005 to take this image, which is presented in false color.
This navigation camera mosaic, created from images taken by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity on sols 115 and 116 (May 21 and 22, 2004) provides a dramatic view of "Endurance Crater." The rover engineering team carefully plotted the safest path into the football field-sized crater, eventually easing the rover down the slopes around sol 130 (June 12, 2004). To the upper left of the crater sits the rover's protective heatshield, which sheltered Opportunity as it passed through the martian atmosphere. The 360-degree view is presented in a cylindrical projection, with geometric and radiometric seam correction.
This false-color image was generated from images obtained by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity on sol 842 (June 7, 2006) using the panoramic camera's 750-nanometer, 530-nanomter, and 430-nanometer filters.
As winter has descended over Meridiani Planum, the availability of solar power for the rovers has diminished greatly. One consequence of less power for Opportunity is that there are fewer telecommunications links via the orbiting Mars Odyssey spacecraft because the rover needs to use the "deep sleep" mode overnight to conserve energy. As a result, images that are not needed specifically to help plan the next sol of operations often stay onboard for much longer time than the science team has been used to. For example, on sol 833 Opportunity became embedded within an unexpectedly deep and very fine-grained ripple, named "Jammerbugt" by the operations team, and spent the next eight sols (834-841) extricating itself.
A series of images from the hazard avoidance camera were quickly returned because they were needed to help plan the drive sequences. However, once the rover was free from the ripple, the science team commanded these panoramic camera image mosaics on sol 842 to show complete coverage of the wheel tracks that were left by Opportunity during the extraction process. The images are of great scientific value but were not critical for planning operations. Accordingly, they were not fully downlinked until sol 864 (June 29, 2006), about three weeks after they were obtained.
Spirit's Recent Travels
"Home Plate" is viewed from orbit. North is at the top and the path followed by the rover Spirit is shown. This image was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on November 22, 2006.
Spirit parked at "Low Ridge" with an 11-degree northerly tilt to maximize sunlight on the solar panels during the southern winter season.
The original image is catalogued as PSP_001513_1655_red.
The left rear wheel of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity makes slow but steady progress through soft dune material in this movie clip of frames taken by the rover's rear hazard identification camera over a period of several days. The sequence starts on Opportunity's 460th martian day, or sol (May 10, 2005) and ends 11 days later. In eight drives during that period, Opportunity advanced a total of 26 centimeters (10 inches) while spinning its wheels enough to have driven 46 meters (151 feet) if there were no slippage. The motion appears to speed up near the end of the clip, but that is an artifact of individual frames being taken less frequently.
A dust devil spins across the surface of Gusev Crater just before noon on Mars. NASA's Spirit rover took the series of images in this spectacular 21-frame animation with its navigation camera on the rover's martian day, or sol, 486 (March 15, 2005).
The event occurred during a period of 9 minutes and 35 seconds beginning at 11:48 a.m. local Mars time, recording the dust devil's progress in a northeasterly direction about 1.0 kilometer (0.62 mile) away from Spirit's perch on the slopes of the "Columbia Hills." The whirlwind was traveling at about 4.8 meters per second (16 feet per second) and covered a distance of about 1.6 kilometers (1 mile).
Contrast has been enhanced for anything in the images that changes from frame to frame, that is, for the dust devil. The dust devil is about 34 meters (112 feet) in diameter.
This image from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity reveals the scene of the rover's heat shield impact. In this view, Opportunity is approximately 130 meters (427 feet) away from the device that protected it while hurtling through the martian atmosphere.
The rover spent 36 sols investigating how the severe heating during entry through the atmosphere affected the heat shield. The most obvious is the fact that the heat shield inverted upon impact.
This is the panoramic camera team's best current attempt at generating a true-color view of what this scene would look like if viewed by a human on Mars. It was generated from a mathematical combination of six calibrated, left-eye panoramic camera images acquired around 1:50 p.m. local solar time on Opportunity's sol 322 (Dec. 19, 2004) using filters ranging in wavelengths from 430 to 750 nanometers.
This movie clip shows movement of dust by a gust of wind inside Mars' Gusev Crater. It consists of frames taken by the navigation camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit during the afternoon of the rover's 495th martian day, or sol (May 25, 2005). Contrast has been enhanced for anything in the images that changes from frame to frame, that is, for the dust moved by wind.
One of the ways scientists collect mineralogical data about rocks on Mars is to view them through filters that allow only specific wavelengths of light to pass through the lens of the panoramic camera. NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit took this false-color image of the rock nicknamed "Tetl" at 1:05 p.m. martian time on its 270th martian day, or sol (Oct. 5, 2004) using the panoramic camera's 750-, 530-, and 430-nanometer filters. Darker red hues in the image correspond to greater concentrations of oxidized soil and dust. Bluer hues correspond to portions of rock that are not as heavily coated with soils or are not as highly oxidized.
While driving eastward toward the northwestern flank of "McCool Hill," the wheels of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit churned up the largest amount of bright soil discovered so far in the mission. This image from Spirit's panoramic camera (Pancam), taken on the rover's 788th Martian day, or sol, of exploration (March 22, 2006), shows the strikingly bright tone and large extent of the materials uncovered.
Several days earlier, Spirit's wheels unearthed a small patch of light-toned material informally named "Tyrone." In images from Spirit's panoramic camera, "Tyrone" strongly resembled both "Arad" and "Paso Robles," two patches of light-toned soils discovered earlier in the mission. Spirit found "Paso Robles" in 2005 while climbing "Cumberland Ridge" on the western slope of "Husband Hill." In early January 2006, the rover discovered "Arad" on the basin floor just south of "Husband Hill." Spirit's instruments confirmed that those soils had a salty chemistry dominated by iron-bearing sulfates. Spirit's Pancam and miniature thermal emission spectrometer examined this most recent discovery, and researchers will compare its properties with the properties of those other deposits.
These discoveries indicate that salty, light-toned soil deposits might be widely distributed on the flanks and valley floors of the "Columbia Hills" region in Gusev Crater on Mars. The salts, which are easily mobilized and concentrated in liquid solution, may record the past presence of water. So far, these enigmatic materials have generated more questions than answers, however, and as Spirit continues to drive across this region in search of a safe winter haven, the team continues to formulate and test hypotheses to explain the rover's most fascinating recent discovery.
This image is a false-color rendering using using Pancam's 753-nanometer, 535-nanometer, and 432-nanometer filters.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit used its navigation camera to capture this view during the rover's 399th martian day, or sol, (Feb. 15, 2005). An attempted drive on that sol did not gain any ground toward nearby "Larry's Lookout" because of slippage that churned the soil on the slope. Spirit used its alpha particle X-ray spectrometer to examine the churned soil. This view is presented in a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
This movie clip shows a single dust devil -- a whirlwind that lofts dust into the air -- that passed near the bottom of the hillside where NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit was located at the time. A shorter clip of the same dust devil was release previously [PIA07861], but an additional frame of the sequence was sent later by the rover. The proximity of the dust devil makes this sequence the best obtained so far for showing details of its structure. Spirit's navigation camera took these images on the rover's 446th martian day, or sol (April 15, 2005.) Contrast has been enhanced for anything in the images that changes from frame to frame, that is, for the dust devil.
Scientists expected dust devils since before Spirit landed. The landing area inside Gusev Crater is filled with dark streaks left behind when dust devils pick dust up from an area. It is also filled with bright "hollows," which are dust-filled miniature craters. Dust covers most of the terrain. Winds flow into and out of Gusev crater every day. The Sun heats the surface so that the surface is warm to the touch even though the atmosphere at 2 meters (6 feet) above the surface would be chilly. That temperature contrast causes convection. Mixing the dust, winds, and convection can trigger dust devils.
At least three different kinds of rocks await scientific analysis at the place where NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit will likely spend several months of Martian winter. They are visible in this picture, which the panoramic camera on Spirit acquired during the rover's 809th sol, or Martian day, of exploring Mars (April 12, 2006). Paper-thin layers of light-toned, jagged-edged rocks protrude horizontally from beneath small sand drifts; a light gray rock with smooth, rounded edges sits atop the sand drifts; and several dark gray to black, angular rocks with vesicles (small holes) typical of hardened lava lie scattered across the sand.
This view is an approximately true-color rendering that combines images taken through the panoramic camera's 753-nanometer, 535-nanometer, and 432-nanometer filters.
As part of its investigation of "Victoria Crater," NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity examined a promontory called "Cape Verde" from the vantage point of "Cape St. Mary," the next promontory clockwise around the crater's deeply scalloped rim. This view of Cape Verde combines several exposures taken by the rover's panoramic camera into an approximately true-color mosaic. The exposures were taken during late-morning lighting conditions.
The upper portion of the crater wall contains a jumble of material tossed outward by the impact that excavated the crater. This vertical cross-section through the blanket of ejected material surrounding the crater was exposed by erosion that expanded the crater outward from its original diameter, according to scientists' interpretation of the observations. Below the jumbled material in the upper part of the wall are layers that survive relatively intact from before the crater-causing impact.
The images combined into this mosaic were taken during the 1,006th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity's Mars-surface mission (Nov. 22, 2006). The panoramic camera took them through the camera's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer filters.
This is a portion of an image, called the "McMurdo Panorama," taken by the panoramic camera on the Spirit rover during its winter campaign. The view is looking toward the east, at "Tyrone," the light-toned soils exposed by the rover's wheels. The Tyrone area proved difficult for Spirit to get through, so the rover was commanded to traverse to "Low Ridge," the site of the winter campaign. Note the light-toned material in the wheel tracks generated as the rover drove to the site. Several rock and soil targets are shown that were investigated with instruments on the rover's robotic arm.
The McMurdo Panorama PIA01907 was acquired over several months while Spirit was on "Low Ridge." It required all of the camera's geology filters and covered 360 degrees in azimuth. This view is in false color, with blue, green and red representing data collected through 430-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 750-nanometer filters, respectively.
The wheels of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity dug more than 10 centimeters (4 inches) deep into the soft, sandy material of a wind-shaped ripple in Mars' Meridiani Planum region during the rover's 446th martian day, or sol (April 26, 2005). Getting the rover out of the ripple, dubbed "Purgatory Dune," required more than five weeks of planning, testing, and carefully monitored driving. Opportunity used its navigation camera to capture this look back at the ripple during sol 491 (June 11, 2005), a week after the rover drove safely onto firmer ground. The ripple that became a sand trap is about one-third meter (one foot) tall and 2.5 meters (8 feet) wide.
As NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is traversing southward toward "Victoria Crater," it is periodically stopping to characterize exposed bedrock, using the contact instrument suite on the robotic arm. Between Martian days (sols) 818 and 821 of the mission (May 13 to May 16), one such characterization was carried out on a rock target called "Cheyenne." The target was brushed by the rock abrasion tool, analyzed by the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer and Moessbauer spectrometer, and photographed by the microscopic imager.
This image is a mosaic of four frames taken by the microscopic imager after the brush had removed dust and sand grains from most of the area shown, exposing the underlying bedrock. The resolution is 30 microns per pixel and the entire mosaic is 6 centimeters (2.4 inches) square. Opportunity acquired the images on Sol 819 (May 14, 2006) while the target was fully shadowed.
This rock surface exhibits relatively small spherical concretions compared to those observed in the vicinity of "Eagle Crater" and "Endurance Crater." Such small concretions, and in places apparent absence of concretions, have characterized the outcrops south of "Vostok Crater." Also visible in this image are small pits and grooves in the rock surface, including narrow, elongated void spaces different from any previously observed by Opportunity. Crystal-shaped and elongated void spaces that were seen in the vicinity of Eagle and Endurance Craters are interpreted as spaces left by dissolving of soluble salts. However, these features at Cheyenne have a significantly different appearance and the science team is considering a number of alternative hypotheses for their origin.
As NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity continues a southward trek from "Erebus Crater" toward "Victoria Crater," the terrain consists of large sand ripples and patches of flat-lying rock outcrops, as shown in this image. Whenever possible, rover planners keep Opportunity on the "pavement" for best mobility.
This false-color image mosaic was assembled using images acquired by the panoramic camera on Opportunity's 784th sol (April 8, 2006) at about 11:45 a.m. local solar time. The camera used its 753-nanometer, 535-nanometer and 432-nanometer filters. This view shows a portion of the outcrop named "Bosque," including rover wheel tracks, fractured and finely-layered outcrop rocks and smaller, dark cobbles littered across the surface.
This view shows tracks created by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit while traveling from the bright soil deposit seen in the upper right, informally named "Tyrone," to the vehicle's current location, dubbed "Winter Haven."
Spirit parked at "Winter Haven" on a small north-facing slope to maximize solar energy input during the Martian winter. This stayover presents an opportunity to do more intensive, long-term investigations of the rover's surroundings than are typically possible during warmer seasons when the vehicle spends more time driving from place to place. One of these activities is assessing the influence of wind by monitoring surface changes. Experience from the Viking Landers of the 1970s suggests that wind-related surface changes are more likely to occur in recently disturbed soil. This mosaic view combines two cameras' images of disturbed soil in Spirit's tracks, taken shortly after arriving at Winter Haven. It will provide a comparison with future images to help reveal any wind-related surface changes.
The mosaic includes images of the rover's tracks obtained through the left eye of the navigation camera on the rover's 807th Martian day, or sol (April 11, 2006), merged with higher-resolution images obtained through the 750-nanomater filter in the left eye of the panoramic camera on sol 835 (May 9, 2006).
This 360-degree view from a site dubbed "Engineering Flats" combines several frames taken by the navigation camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit during the rover's 182nd martian day, or sol (July 7, 2004). Spirit had driven to this spot in the "Columbia Hills" for four sols of engineering work on its right front wheel and a recalibration of positioning accuracy for tools on its robotic arm. The wheel tracks just beyond the rover's shadow indicate where Spirit had spent the preceding three weeks examining rocks in and near "Hank's Hollow." The view is presented in a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
Figure 1 is the left-eye view of a stereo pair and Figure 2 is the right-eye view of a stereo pair.
On May 19th, 2005, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars. This Panoramic Camera (Pancam) mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover's 489th martian day, or sol. Spirit was commanded to stay awake briefly after sending that sol's data to the Mars Odyssey orbiter just before sunset. This small panorama of the western sky was obtained using Pancam's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer color filters. This filter combination allows false color images to be generated that are similar to what a human would see, but with the colors slightly exaggerated. In this image, the bluish glow in the sky above the Sun would be visible to us if we were there, but an artifact of the Pancam's infrared imaging capabilities is that with this filter combination the redness of the sky farther from the sunset is exaggerated compared to the daytime colors of the martian sky. Because Mars is farther from the Sun than the Earth is, the Sun appears only about two-thirds the size that it appears in a sunset seen from the Earth. The terrain in the foreground is the rock outcrop "Jibsheet," a feature that Spirit has been investigating for several weeks (rover tracks are dimly visible leading up to "Jibsheet"). The floor of Gusev crater is visible in the distance, and the Sun is setting behind the wall of Gusev some 80 km (50 miles) in the distance.
This mosaic is yet another example from MER of a beautiful, sublime martian scene that also captures some important scientific information. Specifically, sunset and twilight images are occasionally acquired by the science team to determine how high into the atmosphere the martian dust extends, and to look for dust or ice clouds. Other images have shown that the twilight glow remains visible, but increasingly fainter, for up to two hours before sunrise or after sunset. The long martian twilight (compared to Earth's) is caused by sunlight scattered around to the night side of the planet by abundant high altitude dust. Similar long twilights or extra-colorful sunrises and sunsets sometimes occur on Earth when tiny dust grains that are erupted from powerful volcanoes scatter light high in the atmosphere.
Stretched View Showing 'Victoria'
This pair of images from the panoramic camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity served as initial confirmation that the two-year-old rover is within sight of "Victoria Crater," which it has been approaching for more than a year. Engineers on the rover team were unsure whether Opportunity would make it as far as Victoria, but scientists hoped for the chance to study such a large crater with their roving geologist. Victoria Crater is 800 meters (nearly half a mile) in diameter, about six times wider than "Endurance Crater," where Opportunity spent several months in 2004 examining rock layers affected by ancient water.
When scientists using orbital data calculated that they should be able to detect Victoria's rim in rover images, they scrutinized frames taken in the direction of the crater by the panoramic camera. To positively characterize the subtle horizon profile of the crater and some of the features leading up to it, researchers created a vertically-stretched image (top) from a mosaic of regular frames from the panoramic camera (bottom), taken on Opportunity's 804th Martian day (April 29, 2006).
The stretched image makes mild nearby dunes look like more threatening peaks, but that is only a result of the exaggerated vertical dimension. This vertical stretch technique was first applied to Viking Lander 2 panoramas by Philip Stooke, of the University of Western Ontario, Canada, to help locate the lander with respect to orbiter images. Vertically stretching the image allows features to be more readily identified by the Mars Exploration Rover science team.
The bright white dot near the horizon to the right of center (barely visible without labeling or zoom-in) is thought to be a light-toned outcrop on the far wall of the crater, suggesting that the rover can see over the low rim of Victoria. In figure 1, the northeast and southeast rims are labeled in bright green. Finally, the light purple lines and arrow highlight a small crater.
This movie clip shows a dust devil scooting across a plain inside Gusev Crater on Mars as seen from the NASA rover Spirit's hillside vantage point during the rover's 459th martian day, or sol (April 18, 2005). The individual images were taken about 20 seconds apart by Spirit's navigation camera. Each frame in this movie has the raw image on the top half and a processed version in the lower half that enhances contrast and removes stationary objects, producing an image that is uniformly gray except for features that change from frame to frame.
The movie results from a new way of watching for dust devils, which are whirlwinds that hoist dust from the surface into the air. Spirit began seeing dust devils in isolated images in March 2005. At first, the rover team relied on luck. It might catch a dust devil in an image or it might miss by a few minutes. Using the new detection strategy, the rover takes a series of 21 images. Spirit sends a few of them to Earth, as well as little thumbnail images of all of them. Team members use the 3 big images and all the small images to decide whether the additional big images have dust devils. For this movie, they specifically told Spirit to send back frames that they knew had dust devils.
Scientists expected dust devils since before Spirit landed. The landing area inside Gusev Crater is filled with dark streaks left behind when dust devils pick dust up from an area. It is also filled with bright "hollows," which are dust-filled miniature craters. Dust covers most of the terrain. Winds flow into and out of Gusev crater every day. The Sun heats the surface so that the surface is warm to the touch even though the atmosphere at 2 meters (6 feet) above the surface would be chilly. That temperature contrast causes convection. Mixing the dust, winds, and convection should trigger dust devils.
Scientists will use the images to study several things. Tracking the dust devils tells which way the wind blows at different times of day. Statistics on the size of typical dust devils will help with estimates of how much dust they pump into the atmosphere every day. By watching individual dust devils change as they go over more-dusty and less-dusty terrain, researchers can learn about the turbulent motion near the surface. Ultimately, that motion of wind and dust near the surface relates these small dust devils with Mars' large dust storms.
This 360-degree panorama combines several frames taken by the navigation camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit during the rover's 313th martian day (Nov. 19, 2004). The site, labeled Spirit site 93, is in the "Columbia Hills" inside Gusev Crater. The rover tracks point westward. Spirit had driven eastward, in reverse and dragging its right front wheel, for about 30 meters (100 feet) on the day the picture was taken. Driving backwards while dragging that wheel is a precautionary strategy to extend the usefulness of the wheel for when it is most needed, because it has developed more friction than the other wheels. The right-hand track in this look backwards shows how the dragging disturbed the soil. This view is presented in a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
This 360-degree view combines frames taken by the navigation camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit during the rover's 271st martian day, or sol, on Oct. 7, 2004. The rover had just driven into position for using the tools on its robotic arm (not in the picture) to examine a layered rock called "Tetl" in the "Columbia Hills." Spirit's total driving distance from its landing to this point was 3,641 meters (2.26 miles), more than six times the distance set as a criterion for mission success. The three-dimensional view is presented here in a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
Figure 1 is the left-eye view of a stereo pair and Figure 2 is the right-eye view of a stereo pair.
Three years after embarking on a historic exploration of the red planet and six miles away from its landing site, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is traversing "Victoria Crater" ridge by ridge, peering at layered cliffs in the interior. To identify various alcoves and cliffs along the way, science team members are using names of places visited by the 16th-century Earth explorer Ferdinand Magellan and his crew aboard the ship Victoria, who proved the Earth is round. (All names are unofficial unless approved by the International Astronomical Union.) This orbital view of "Victoria Crater" was taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Opportunity's Traverse from Landing through Sol 413 Opportunity's Fast Progress Southward
As of the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity's 413th martian day, or sol, (March 23, 2005), the robot had driven a total of 4.62 kilometers (2.87 miles) since. The red line on this image traces the rover's route. The base image is a mosaic combining images from the Mars Observer Camera on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter, the Thermal Emission Imaging System on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, and Opportunity's own Descent Image Motion Estimation System.
The rover has been making rapid progress southward since it finished examining its jettisoned heat shield on sol 357 (Jan. 24, 2005, one year after landing). Scientists are eager for Opportunity to reach an area to the south called the "Etched Terrain," which appears mottled in the map's base images and might offer access to different layers of bedrock than what the rover has seen so far. See figure 1.
As of the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity's 414th martian day, or sol, (March 24, 2005), the robot had driven a total of 4.81 kilometers (2.99 miles) since landing. In this two-month period, Opportunity drove 2.69 kilometers (1.67 miles). As landmarks along the route, it used craters that the rover team informally named for ships of historic voyages of exploration. See figure 2.
Figures 1 and 2 are traverse maps overlaid on a mosaic of images from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey orbiters and from Opportunity's descent camera. The scale bar in figure 1 at lower left is 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) long and the scale bar in figure 2 is 1 kilometer (0.62 mile) long.This view of "Victoria crater" is looking southeast from "Duck Bay" towards the dramatic promontory called "Cabo Frio." The small crater in the right foreground, informally known as "Sputnik," is about 20 meters (about 65 feet) away from the rover, the tip of the spectacular, layered, Cabo Frio promontory itself is about 200 meters (about 650 feet) away from the rover, and the exposed rock layers are about 15 meters (about 50 feet) tall. This is an enhanced false color rendering of images taken by the panoramic camera (Pancam) on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity during the rover's 952nd sol, or Martian day, (Sept. 28, 2006) using the camera's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer filters.
On the Verge of 'Victoria'
Once it was more like a distant dream, the ultimate bonus to an already marvelous Martian mission. Now, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is on the brink of the expansive "Victoria Crater," a depression that truly makes those on the path to it look like dimples. At about 800 meters (nearly half-a-mile) in diameter, Victoria is five times larger then "Endurance Crater."
This image from Opportunity's navigation camera is labeled to highlight features of the large crater. Victoria Crater is informally named for the flagship of Ferdinand Magellan's 16th-Century expedition around the world, and many the features of Victoria will be informally named for places visited by that expedition.
The feature labeled in dark yellow as "Bright Crater" is another crater just outside the far rim of Victoria. At 30 to 40 meters (98 to 131 feet) in diameter, the depression is larger than Opportunity's landing site, "Eagle Crater." Labeled in bright purple is "Duck Crater," a small dimple on the near side of Victoria Crater (the name is used as a placeholder until the team decides if it will name it or not). Other distant craters are labeled in bright blue.
On the far right of the image is "Kitty Clyde's Sister," a highly degraded crater informally named for a boat in John Wesley Powell's 19th-Century expedition through the Grand Canyon.
The science and engineering teams are strategizing on the best way to approach, and possibly enter, Victoria Crater.
This image was taken on the rover's 943th sol on Mars (Sept. 18, 2006).
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity rover spent about 300 sols (Martian days) during 2006 and 2007 traversing the rim of Victoria Crater. Besides looking for a good place to enter the crater, the rover obtained images of rock outcrops exposed at several cliffs along the way.
The cliff in this image from Opportunity's panoramic camera (Pancam) is informally named Cape St. Vincent. It is a promontory approximately 12 meters (39 feet) tall on the northern rim of Victoria crater, near the farthest point along the rover's traverse around the rim. Layers seen in Cape St. Vincent have proven to be among the best examples of meter scale cross-bedding observed on Mars to date. Cross-bedding is a geologic term for rock layers which are inclined relative to the horizontal and which are indicative of ancient sand dune deposits. In order to get a better look at these outcrops, Pancam "super-resolution" imaging techniques were utilized. Super-resolution is a type of imaging mode which acquires many pictures of the same target to reconstruct a digital image at a higher resolution than is native to the camera. These super-resolution images have allowed scientists to discern that the rocks at Victoria Crater once represented a large dune field, not unlike the Sahara desert on Earth, and that this dune field migrated with an ancient wind flowing from the north to the south across the region. Other rover chemical and mineral measurements have shown that many of the ancient sand dunes studied in Meridiani Planum were modified by surface and subsurface liquid water long ago.
This is a Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity Panoramic Camera image acquired on sol 1167 (May 7, 2007), and was constructed from a mathematical combination of 16 different blue filter (480 nm) images.
Voir l'image PIA10210: Details of Layers in Victoria Crater's Cape St. Vincent sur le site de la NASA.
Now that solar conjunction is over so that communication between Earth and Mars is no longer blocked by the Sun, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is continuing its trek through the "Columbia Hills" in Gusev Crater. Straight ahead, in the foreground of this image, is a horizontally layered rock dubbed "Tetl," which scientists hope to investigate. Layering can be either volcanic or sedimentary in origin; researchers aim to determine which of these processes created this rock. If for some reason this particular rock is not favorably positioned for grinding and examination by the toolbox of instruments on the rover's robotic arm, Spirit will be within short reach of another similar rock, dubbed "Coba," just to the right, toward the middle of this image. Spirit took this image with its navigation camera on its 263rd martian day, or sol (Sept. 28, 2004).
While driving eastward toward the northwestern flank of "McCool Hill," the wheels of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit churned up the largest amount of bright soil discovered so far in the mission. This image from Spirit's navigation camera, taken on the rover's 787th Martian day, or sol, of exploration (March 21, 2006), shows the strikingly light tone and large extent of the deposit.
A few days earlier, Spirit's wheels unearthed a small patch of light-toned material informally named "Tyrone." In images from Spirit's panoramic camera, "Tyrone" strongly resembled both "Arad" and "Paso Robles," two patches of light-toned soils discovered earlier in the mission. Spirit found "Paso Robles" in 2005 while climbing "Cumberland Ridge" on the western slope of "Husband Hill." In early January 2006, the rover discovered "Arad" on the basin floor just south of "Husband Hill." Spirit's instruments confirmed that those soils had a salty chemistry dominated by iron-bearing sulfates. Spirit's miniature thermal emission spectrometer is analyzing this most recent discovery, and researchers will compare it with those other deposits.
These discoveries indicate that light-toned soil deposits might be widely distributed on the flanks and valley floors of the "Columbia Hills" region in Gusev Crater on Mars. The salts may record the past presence of water, as they are easily mobilized and concentrated in liquid solution.
This stereo view was taken by the panoramic camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit on the rover's 82nd martian day, or sol (March 27, 2004). At that point in its primary mission, Spirit was investigating a rock called "Mazatzal" on the rim of "Bonneville Crater." The image shows rocky terrain surrounding the crater. The rover had to pick its way through that terrain on its way to the "Columbia Hills," in the distance on the left. Rolling terrain is apparent in the mid-distance. Barely visible to the right of the hills is the outline of the distant rim of Gusev Crater.
This view is presented as cylindrical-perspective projection. It combines images from the left and right eyes of the panoramic camera, taken through blue filters on both sides.
Figure 1 is the left-eye view of a stereo pair and Figure 2 is the right-eye view of a stereo pair.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity captured this view of its heat shield debris field on the rover's 347th martian day, or sol (Jan. 14, 2005). The view is a southward-looking, 60-degree panorama assembled from four images taken by Opportunity's navigation camera. It is presented as a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction. The main piece of the heat shield is in the middle of the image, with the smaller flank piece behind it and the divot caused by the impact on the right.
Voir l'image PIA07321: Opportunity's View on Sol 347 sur le site de la NASA.
At the Gusev site recently, skies have been very dusty, and on its 421st sol (March 10, 2005) NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit spied two dust devils in action. This is an image from the rover's navigation camera.
Views of the Gusev landing region from orbit show many dark streaks across the landscape -- tracks where dust devils have removed surface dust to show relatively darker soil below -- but this is the first time Spirit has photographed an active dust devil.
Scientists are considering several causes of these small phenomena. Dust devils often occur when the Sun heats the surface of Mars. Warmed soil and rocks heat the layer of atmosphere closest to the surface, and the warm air rises in a whirling motion, stirring dust up from the surface like a miniature tornado. Another possibility is that a flow structure might develop over craters as wind speeds increase. As winds pick up, turbulence eddies and rotating columns of air form. As these columns grow in diameter they become taller and gain rotational speed. Eventually they become self-sustaining and the wind blows them down range.
One sol before this image was taken, power output from Spirit's solar panels went up by about 50 percent when the amount of dust on the panels decreased. Was this a coincidence, or did a helpful dust devil pass over Spirit and lift off some of the dust?
By comparing the separate images from the rover's different cameras, team members estimate that the dust devils moved about 500 meters (1,640 feet) in the 155 seconds between the navigation camera and hazard-avoidance camera frames; that equates to about 3 meters per second (7 miles per hour). The dust devils appear to be about 1,100 meters (almost three-quarters of a mile) from the rover.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity climbed out of "Endurance Crater" during the rover's 315th sol (Dec. 12, 2004), and used its front hazard-avoidance camera to look back across the crater from the rim. The rover spent just over six months inside the stadium-sized crater, examining in detail the tallest stack of bedrock layers ever seen up close on a foreign planet.
This black-and-white image shows the first layered rocks scientists have seen close up in Gusev Crater, where NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit landed Jan. 4, 2004. While Spirit's twin rover, Opportunity, reached the stadium-size Endurance Crater on the other side of Mars and began exploring its many layered outcrops in early May, Spirit traveled more than 3.5 kilometers (2.2 miles) to get to this layered bedrock in the "Columbia Hills." Scientists are planning to conduct a study of these rocks to determine if they are volcanic or sedimentary in origin, and if they have been chemically altered. Spirit's panoramic camera took this image on sol 217 (Aug. 13, 2004).
At a rock called "Clovis," the rock abrasion tool on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit cut a 9-millimeter (0.35-inch) hole during the rover's 216th martian day, or sol (Aug. 11, 2004). The hole is the deepest drilled in a rock on Mars so far. This approximately true-color view was made from images taken by Spirit's panoramic camera on sol 226 (Aug. 21, 2004) at around 12:50 p.m. local true solar time -- early afternoon in Gusev Crater on Mars. To the right is a "brush flower" of circles produced by scrubbing the surface of the rock with the abrasion tool's wire brush. Scientists used rover's Moessbauer spectrometer and alpha particle X-ray spectrometer to look for iron-bearing minerals and determine the elemental chemical composition of the rock. This composite combines images taken with the camera's 750-, 530-, and 430-nanometer filters. The grayish-blue hue in this image suggests that the interior of the rock contains iron minerals that are less oxidized than minerals on the surface. The diameter of the hole cut into the rock is 4.5 centimeters (1.8 inches).
Data on the graph (Figure 1) from the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer instrument on the robotic arm of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit reveal the elemental chemistry of two rocks, "Ebenezer" and "Clovis," (see PIA06914) in the "Columbia Hills." Scientists found, through comparison of the rocks' chemistry, that Ebenezer and Clovis have very different compositions from the rocks on the Gusev plains.
This image taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows a target dubbed "Grindstone" on a rock called "Manitoba" in "Endurance Crater." Opportunity dug a hole into the target with its rock abrasion tool, then captured this picture with its microscopic imager on sol 152 (June 28, 2004). The image mosaic is about 6 centimeters (2.4 inches) across.
This view of Victoria crater is looking north from "Duck Bay" towards the dramatic promontory called "Cape Verde." The dramatic cliff of layered rocks is about 50 meters (about 165 feet) away from the rover and is about 6 meters (about 20 feet) tall. The taller promontory beyond that is about 100 meters (about 325 feet) away, and the vista beyond that extends away for more than 400 meters (about 1300 feet) into the distance. This is an enhanced false color rendering of images taken by the panoramic camera (Pancam) on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity during the rover's 952nd sol, or Martian day, (Sept. 28, 2006) using the camera's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer filters.
This image, taken by the panoramic camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, shows the mark left by the rover's rock abrasion tool on the rock dubbed "Ebenezer," located in Gusev Crater at the "Columbia Hills." Scientists investigated the rock with the abrasion tool and determined its chemistry using the rover's alpha particle X-ray spectrometer instrument. Both instruments are located on the rover's robotic arm. Spirit took this image on its 236th martian day, or sol (Sept. 1, 2004). This is a true-color image generated from a composite of left-eye camera filters (750 to 430 nanometers).
Data on the graph (Figure 1) from the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer instrument on the robotic arm of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit reveal the elemental chemistry of two rocks, "Ebenezer" and "Clovis," (see PIA06837) in the "Columbia Hills." Scientists found, through comparison of the rocks' chemistry, that Ebenezer and Clovis have very different compositions from the rocks on the Gusev plains.
A spectacular field of Martian sand ripples separates NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit from the slopes of "Husband Hill." It has been 200 Martian days, or sols, since the rover started a descent from the top of the peak to the rover's current position on "Low Ridge." Looking back to the north on sol 813 (April 17, 2006), Spirit acquired this blue-filter (436-nanometer) view with the right panoramic camera (Pancam) while the Sun was low in the sky late in the afternoon. Because of the low-angle lighting (sunlight is coming from the left), images like this provide superb views of subtle textures in the topography both near and far. Husband Hill, where the rover was perched late last summer, rises prominently just left of center in this view. A 150-meter wide (500 foot) field of curving sand ripples named "El Dorado" lies at the base of Husband Hill.
By collecting photos like this at different times of day, when lighting comes from different directions, scientists can distinguish surface properties such as color and reflectivity from topography and roughness. By separating these components they can map more details of the geologic terrain, providing new clues about the geologic history of Gusev Crater.
As part of its investigation of "Victoria Crater," NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity examined a section of the scalloped rim called "Bottomless Bay" (or "Bahia sin Fondo"). This view shows the northeastern side of Bottomless Bay as seen from the southwest. The exposures combined into this mosaic were taken by the rover's panoramic camera through a 750-nanometer filter during the 1,019th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity's Mars-surface mission (Dec. 5, 2006).
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit collected data on morphology, composition, and mineralogy of a rock nicknamed "Tetl" using the microscopic imager, the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, and the Moessbauer spectrometer before moving on. Scientists are discussing a suggestion that this rock outcrop and others on the "West Spur" of the "Columbia Hills" in Gusev Crater on Mars may contain evidence of graded bedding, in which alternate layers of sediment are either coarser or finer depending on the turbulence of the processes that deposited them. Such layers could be deposited by water circulating in rivers or lakes, volcanic ash settling on the surface, wind carrying fine-grained sediments, or a combination of these processes. This view is a mosaic of images that Spirit took with its microscopic imager on the rover's 272nd and 273rd martian days, or sols (Oct. 7 and 8, 2004). It has been enhanced to bring out details in the shadows without washing out sunlit areas. The section of rock shown here is approximately 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) wide.
As part of its investigation of "Victoria Crater," NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity examined a promontory called "Cape Verde" from the vantage point of "Cape St. Mary," the next promontory clockwise around the crater's deeply scalloped rim. This view of Cape Verde combines several exposures taken by the rover's panoramic camera into a false-color mosaic. The exposures were taken during late-morning lighting conditions.
The upper portion of the crater wall contains a jumble of material tossed outward by the impact that excavated the crater. This vertical cross-section through the blanket of ejected material surrounding the crater was exposed by erosion that expanded the crater outward from its original diameter, according to scientists' interpretation of the observations. Below the jumbled material in the upper part of the wall are layers that survive relatively intact from before the crater-causing impact.
The images combined into this mosaic were taken during the 1,006th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity's Mars-surface mission (Nov. 22, 2006). The panoramic camera took them through the camera's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer filters. The false color enhances subtle color differences among materials in the rocks and soils of the scene.
While driving eastward toward the northwestern flank of "McCool Hill," the wheels of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit churned up the largest amount of bright soil discovered so far in the mission. This image from Spirit's panoramic camera (Pancam), taken on the rover's 788th Martian day, or sol, of exploration (March 22, 2006), shows the strikingly bright tone and large extent of the materials uncovered.
Several days earlier, Spirit's wheels unearthed a small patch of light-toned material informally named "Tyrone." In images from Spirit's panoramic camera, "Tyrone" strongly resembled both "Arad" and "Paso Robles," two patches of light-toned soils discovered earlier in the mission. Spirit found "Paso Robles" in 2005 while climbing "Cumberland Ridge" on the western slope of "Husband Hill." In early January 2006, the rover discovered "Arad" on the basin floor just south of "Husband Hill." Spirit's instruments confirmed that those soils had a salty chemistry dominated by iron-bearing sulfates. Spirit's Pancam and miniature thermal emission spectrometer examined this most recent discovery, and researchers will compare its properties with the properties of those other deposits.
These discoveries indicate that salty, light-toned soil deposits might be widely distributed on the flanks and valley floors of the "Columbia Hills" region in Gusev Crater on Mars. The salts, which are easily mobilized and concentrated in liquid solution, may record the past presence of water. So far, these enigmatic materials have generated more questions than answers, however, and as Spirit continues to drive across this region in search of a safe winter haven, the team continues to formulate and test hypotheses to explain the rover's most fascinating recent discovery.
This view is an approximately true-color rendering that combines separate images taken through the Pancam's 753-nanometer, 535-nanometer, and 432-nanometer filters.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has this view northward from the position at the north edge of the "Home Plate" plateau where the rover will spend its third Martian winter.
Husband Hill is on the horizon. The dark area in the middle distance is "El Dorado" sand dune field.
Spirit used its panoramic camera (Pancam) to capture this image during the rover's 1,448th Martian day, of sol (Jan. 29, 2008).
This view combines separate images taken through the Pancam filters centered on wavelengths of 753 nanometers, 535 nanometers and 432 nanometers. It is presented in a false-color stretch to bring out subtle color differences in the scene.
Voir l'image PIA10240: View from Spirit's Overwintering Position (False Color) sur le site de la NASA.
This movie clip shows a single dust devil -- a whirlwind that lofts dust into the air -- about 2 kilometers (1 mile) away, moving across a plain inside Mars' Gusev Crater for several minutes. The dust devil appears in 21 frames. The number of seconds elapsed since the first frame is indicated at lower left of the images, typically 20 seconds between frames. The navigation camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit took these images on the rover's 445th martian day, or sol (April 14, 2005.) Contrast has been enhanced for anything in the images that changes from frame to frame, that is, for the dust devil.
Scientists expected dust devils since before Spirit landed. The landing area inside Gusev Crater is filled with dark streaks left behind when dust devils pick dust up from an area. It is also filled with bright "hollows," which are dust-filled miniature craters. Dust covers most of the terrain. Winds flow into and out of Gusev crater every day. The Sun heats the surface so that the surface is warm to the touch even though the atmosphere at 2 meters (6 feet) above the surface would be chilly. That temperature contrast causes convection. Mixing the dust, winds, and convection can trigger dust devils.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity continues to cut southward across a plain marked by large sand ripples and a pavement of outcrop rock. The ripple in the center of the image shows a distinct pattern of banding, which the science team hopes to investigate more closely during the trek through this terrain. The banding and other features have inspired a hypothesis that Meridiani ripples are old features that are currently being eroded, and not transported, by wind. This navigation camera image was taken on Opportunity's sol 795, April 19, 2006.
At least three different kinds of rocks await scientific analysis at the place where NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit will likely spend several months of Martian winter. They are visible in this picture, which the panoramic camera on Spirit acquired during the rover's 809th sol, or Martian day, of exploring Mars (April 12, 2006). Paper-thin layers of light-toned, jagged-edged rocks protrude horizontally from beneath small sand drifts; a light gray rock with smooth, rounded edges sits atop the sand drifts; and several dark gray to black, angular rocks with vesicles (small holes) typical of hardened lava lie scattered across the sand.
This view is a false-color rendering that combines images taken through the panoramic camera's 753-nanometer, 535-nanometer, and 432-nanometer filters.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity extended its cumulative Martian driving record to more than 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) by crossing 50.51 meters (165.7 feet) of flat ground during the 1,080th Martian day since arriving on Mars. This view shows the surroundings at the completion of the day's drive. It is a mosaic of frames taken by Opportunity's navigation camera.
The drive continued Opportunity's clockwise progress around the rim of "Victoria Crater," which is visible near the horizon.
Opportunity began its fourth year of exploring Mars in January 2007. Its mission was originally planned for three months, with a driving-distance goal of 600 meters (1,969 feet).
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit acquired the images that went into this color composite with its panoramic camera around 1:00 p.m. martian time on its 270th martian day, or sol (Oct. 5, 2004). The view represents the panoramic-camera team's best current attempt at generating a "true color" view of what this scene would look like if viewed by a human on Mars. It was generated from a mathematical combination of six calibrated images acquired through filters for wavelengths between 430 nanometers and 750 nanometers.
This approximately true-color rendering was generated from images obtained by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity on sol 842 (June 7, 2006) using the panoramic camera's 600-nanometer, 530-nanometer, and 480-nanometer filters.
As winter has descended over Meridiani Planum, the availability of solar power for the rovers has diminished greatly. One consequence of less power for Opportunity is that there are fewer telecommunications links via the orbiting Mars Odyssey spacecraft because the rover needs to use the "deep sleep" mode overnight to conserve energy. As a result, images that are not needed specifically to help plan the next sol of operations often stay onboard for much longer time than the science team has been used to. For example, on sol 833 Opportunity became embedded within an unexpectedly deep and very fine-grained ripple, named "Jammerbugt" by the operations team, and spent the next eight sols (834-841) extricating itself.
A series of images from the hazard avoidance camera were quickly returned because they were needed to help plan the drive sequences. However, once the rover was free from the ripple, the science team commanded these panoramic camera image mosaics on sol 842 to show complete coverage of the wheel tracks that were left by Opportunity during the extraction process. The images are of great scientific value but were not critical for planning operations. Accordingly, they were not fully downlinked until sol 864 (June 29, 2006), about three weeks after they were obtained.
This portion of an image acquired by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera shows the Spirit rover's winter campaign site. Spirit was parked on a slope tilted 11 degrees to the north to maximize sunlight during the southern winter season. "Tyrone" is an area where the rover's wheels disturbed light-toned soils. Remote sensing and in-situ analyses found the light-toned soil at Tyrone to be sulfate rich and hydrated. The original picture is catalogued as PSP_001513_1655_red and was taken on Sept. 29, 2006.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, is the prime contractor for the project and built the spacecraft. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment is operated by the University of Arizona, Tucson, and the instrument was built by Ball Aerospace and Technology Corp., Boulder, Colo.
This movie clip shows a dust devil growing in size and blowing across the plain inside Mars' Gusev Crater. The clip consists of frames taken by the navigation camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit during the morning of the rover's 496th martian day, or sol (May 26, 2005). Contrast has been enhanced for anything in the images that changes from frame to frame, that is, for the dust moved by wind.
The navigation camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity took images during the rover's 285th martian day (Nov. 11, 2004) that are combined into this panorama. Opportunity had reached the base of "Burns Cliff," a portion of the inner wall of "Endurance Crater." This view shows rock layers in the wall, with a portion of Opportunity's solar array visible at the bottom right.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit used its navigation camera to take the images combined into this 360-degree view of the rover's surroundings on Spirit's 409th martian day, or sol (Feb. 26, 2005). Spirit had driven 2 meters (7 feet) on this sol to get in position on "Cumberland Ridge" for looking into "Tennessee Valley" to the east. This location is catalogued as Spirit's Site 108. Rover-wheel tracks from climbing the ridge are visible on the right. The summit of "Husband Hill" is at the center, to the south. This view is presented in a cylindrical projection with geometric and brightness seam correction.
A layer of light-toned rock exposed inside Victoria Crater in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars appears to mark where the surface was at the time, many millions of years ago, when an impact excavated the crater. NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity drove to this bright band as the science team's first destination for the rover during investigations inside the crater.
Opportunity's left front hazard-identification camera took this image just after the rover finished a drive of 2.25 meters (7 feet, 5 inches) during the rover's 1,305th Martian day, or sol, (Sept. 25, 2007). The rocks beneath the rover and its extended robotic arm are part of the bright band.
Victoria Crater has a scalloped shape of alternating alcoves and promontories around the crater's circumference. Opportunity descended into the crater two weeks earlier, within an alcove called "Duck Bay." Counterclockwise around the rim, just to the right of the arm in this image, is a promontory called "Cabo Frio."
This composite of three images from the navigation camera shows the view from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity toward the southeast, in the direction of "Victoria Crater," on the rover's 817th Martian day, or sol (May 12, 2006). To reach Victoria Crater, still about 1,100 meters (two-thirds of a mile) from this location, the rover must navigate among the large ripples visible on the left and ahead in the distance.
On this sol, Opportunity was preparing to deploy its arm instrument suite to analyze a rock on the outcrop pavement. At upper right is a small depression that was the target of further imaging on sols 825 and 826 (May 20 and 21, 2006).
An exposure of bedrock dubbed "Larry's Outcrop" on the flank of "Husband Hill" inside Mars' Gusev Crater shows little layering in this view. NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit used its panoramic camera in May 2005 to take the images combined into this mosaic.
Soil on Mars can be a bit clumpy, as shown in this image of soil after it was compacted by one of the wheels of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. Scientists think the light-colored material may be a global layer of airfall dust. Spirit's microscopic imager took this picture, showing an area approximately 3 centimeters (1.2 inches) square, during the rover's 314th martian day, or sol (Nov. 19, 2004).
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit used its navigation camera to capture this view during the rover's 390th martian day, or sol, (Feb. 6, 2005). The rover advanced about 13 meters (43 feet) driving backwards uphill on that sol. The view is uphill toward "Cumberland Ridge" on "Husband Hill." It is presented in a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
This image captured by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows "Cape St. Vincent," one of the many promontories that jut out from the walls of Victoria Crater, Mars. The material at the top of the promontory consists of loose, jumbled rock, then a bit further down into the crater, abruptly transitions to solid bedrock. This transition point is marked by a bright band of rock, visible around the entire crater.
Scientists say this bright band represents what used to be the surface of Mars before it was impacted to form Victoria Crater. As Opportunity begins to descend into the crater in early July 2007, it will examine the band carefully at an accessible location with a gentle slope. These investigations might help determine if the band's brighter appearance is the result of ancient interactions with the Martian atmosphere.
This image was taken by Opportunity's panoramic camera on sol 1167 (May 6, 2007). It is presented in approximately true color.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit took this microscopic image of a target called "Bubbles" on a rock called "Champagne" after using its rock abrasion tool to brush away a coating of dust. The circular brushed area is about 5 centimeters (2 inches) across. This rock is different from rocks out on the plains of Gusev Crater but is similar to other rocks in this area of the "Columbia Hills" in that it has higher levels of phosphorus. Plagioclase, a mineral commonly found in igneous rocks, is also present in these rocks, according to analysis with the minature thermal emission spectrometer. By using the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer to collect data over multiple martian days, or sols, scientists are also beginning to get measurements of trace elements in these rocks. Spirit took the images that are combined into this mosaic on sol 354 (Dec. 30, 2004).
This image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity near the rim of "Victoria Crater." Victoria is an impact crater about 800 meters (half a mile) in diameter at Meridiani Planum near the equator of Mars. Opportunity has been operating on Mars since January, 2004. Five days before this image was taken, Opportunity arrived at the rim of Victoria, after a drive of more than 9 kilometers (over 5 miles). It then drove to the position where it is seen in this image.
Shown in the image are "Duck Bay," the eroded segment of the crater rim where Opportunity first arrived at the crater; "Cabo Frio," a sharp promontory to the south of Duck Bay; and "Cape Verde," another promontory to the north. When viewed at the highest resolution, this image shows the rover itself, wheel tracks in the soil behind it, and the rover's shadow, including the shadow of the camera mast. After this image was taken, Opportunity moved to the very tip of Cape Verde to perform more imaging of the interior of the crater.
This view is a portion of an image taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft on Oct. 3, 2006. The complete image is centered at minus7.8 degrees latitude, 279.5 degrees East longitude. The range to the target site was 297 kilometers (185.6 miles). At this distance the image scale is 29.7 centimeters (12 inches) per pixel (with 1 x 1 binning) so objects about 89 centimeters (35 inches) across are resolved. North is up. The image was taken at a local Mars time of 3:30 PM and the scene is illuminated from the west with a solar incidence angle of 59.7 degrees, thus the sun was about 30.3 degrees above the horizon. At a solar longitude of 113.6 degrees, the season on Mars is northern summer.
This is an enhanced-color view generated from images acquired by theHiRISE camera using its red filter and blue-green filter.
Images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment and additional information about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are available online at: http://www.nasa.gov/mro or http://HiRISE.lpl.arizona.edu.For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, http://www.nasa.gov.
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems is the prime contractor for the project and built the spacecraft. The HiRISE camera was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation and is operated by the University of Arizona.
Since leaving "Victoria Crater," Opportunity has picked up the pace of driving. In the 90 sols (Martian days) since exiting the crater, Opportunity has driven more than 1,800 meters (1.1 miles), three times the distance that was required for the original prime mission. Scientists expect to encounter younger rocks the farther south the rover travels. They also expect to find small rocks ejected onto the landscape during formation of nearby craters. To reach these things, the rover must avoid sand traps as much as possible.
Opportunity acquired this mosaic with the navigation camera on the rover’s 1,683rd Martian day, or sol (Oct. 18, 2008), of exploration.
Voir l'image PIA11750: Places to Go, Things to See sur le site de la NASA.
This image shows "Duck Bay," an alcove in the rim of Victoria Crater. NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity will roll down the slopes of Duck Bay in early July 2007 and investigate the rocks inside the crater. One of its first targets will be the bright band of bedrock seen here lining the upper portion of the crater walls.
This band appears to be unlike anything encountered before at Opportunity's landing site. Scientists say it marks the spot where the ground surface used to lie just before an impact formed Victoria Crater. Future investigations with Opportunity might help determine whether the band's brighter appearance is the result of ancient interactions with the Martian atmosphere.
This false-color view, taken by Opportunity's panoramic camera, was previously released as part of a larger picture (see PIA09103).
Wheel tracks from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity show where the rover struggled for traction while driving away from "Wopmay" rock inside "Endurance Crater." The rover looked back for this view from its navigation camera on its 272nd martian day (Oct. 29, 2004).
This Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity Pancam "super resolution" mosaic of the approximately 6 m (20 foot) high cliff face of the Cape Verde promontory was taken by the rover from inside Victoria Crater, during the rover's descent into Duck Bay. Super-resolution is an imaging technique which utilizes information from multiple pictures of the same target in order to generate an image with a higher resolution than any of the individual images. Cape Verde is a geologically rich outcrop and is teaching scientists about how rocks at Victoria crater were modified since they were deposited long ago. This image complements super resolution mosaics obtained at Cape St. Mary and Cape St. Vincent and is consistent with the hypothesis that Victoria crater is located in the middle of what used to be an ancient sand dune field. Many rover team scientists are hoping to be able to eventually drive the rover closer to these layered rocks in the hopes of measuring their chemistry and mineralogy.
This is a Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity Panoramic Camera image mosaic acquired on sols 1342 and 1356 (November 2 and 17, 2007), and was constructed from a mathematical combination of 64 different blue filter (480 nm) images.
Voir l'image PIA10209: Cape Verde sur le site de la NASA.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has found a patch of bright-toned soil so rich in silica that scientists propose water must have been involved in concentrating it.
The silica-rich patch, informally named "Gertrude Weise" after a player in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, was exposed when Spirit drove over it during the 1,150th Martian day, or sol, of Spirit's Mars surface mission (March 29, 2007). One of Spirit's six wheels no longer rotates, so it leaves a deep track as it drags through soil. Most patches of disturbed, bright soil that Spirit had investigated previously are rich in sulfur, but this one has very little sulfur and is about 90 percent silica.
Spirit's panoramic camera imaged the bright patch through various filters on Sol 1,158 (April 6). This approximately true-color image combines images taken through three different filters. The track of disturbed soil is roughly 20 centimeters (8 inches) wide.
Spirit's miniature thermal emission spectrometer, which can assess a target's mineral composition from a distance, examined the Gertrude Weise patch on Sol 1,172 (April 20). The indications it found for silica in the overturned soil prompted a decision to drive Spirit close enough to touch the soil with the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, a chemical analyzer at the end of Spirit's robotic arm. The alpha particle X-ray spectrometer collected data about this target on sols 1,189 and 1,190 (May 8 and May 9) and produced the finding of approximately 90 percent silica.
Silica is silicon dioxide. On Earth, it commonly occurs as the crystalline mineral quartz and is the main ingredient in window glass. The Martian silica at Gertrude Weise is non-crystalline, with no detectable quartz.
In most cases, water is required to produce such a concentrated deposit of silica, according to members of the rover science team. One possible origin for the silica could have been interaction of soil with acidic steam produced by volcanic activity. Another could have been from water in a hot spring environment.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has found an iron meteorite on Mars, the first meteorite of any type ever identified on another planet. The pitted, basketball-size object is mostly made of iron and nickel. Readings from spectrometers on the rover determined that composition. Opportunity used its panoramic camera to take the images used in this approximately true-color composite on the rover's 339th martian day, or sol (Jan. 6, 2005). This composite combines images taken through the panoramic camera's 600-nanometer (red), 530-nanometer (green), and 480-nanometer (blue) filters.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity recently stopped to analyze an exposure of rock near "Beagle Crater," on a target nicknamed "Baltra." Nearly 100 sols, or Martian days, had passed since Opportunity had last analyzed one of the now-familiar rock exposures seen on the Plains of Meridiani. The rover ground a 3-millimeter-deep (0.12-inch-deep) hole in the rock using the rock abrasion tool on sol 893 (July 29, 2006) while stationed about 25 meters (82 feet) from the southwest rim of Beagle Crater.
Scientists wanted to analyze the outcrop one more time before driving the rover onto the ring of smooth material surrounding "Victoria Crater." Opportunity's analysis showed the rock to be very similar in its elemental composition to other exposures encountered during the rover's southward trek across Meridiani Planum.
Opportunity's microscopic imager acquired this view on sol 894 (July 30, 2006) while the target was fully shadowed. The view shows an area about 6 centimeters (2.4 inches) across, just spanning the diameter of the hole ground into Baltra. The image resolution of 30 microns per pixel makes it possible to see features as small as 0.1 millimeter (0.004 inch).
Clouds add drama to the sky above "Endurance Crater" in this mosaic of frames taken by the navigation camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity at about 9:30 a.m. on the rover's 290th sol (Nov. 16, 2004). The view spans an arc from east on the left to the southwest on the right.
These clouds are part of a band that forms near the equator when Mars is near the part of its orbit that is farthest from the Sun. For Opportunity (and Spirit and the rest of the southern hemisphere), this occurs in late fall and early winter. During this period, atmospheric temperatures and the amount of water vapor combine to form large-scale clouds. These clouds look like Earth's cirrus clouds and share other similarities with cirrus clouds in that they are believed to be composed entirely of water-ice particles with sizes on the order of several micrometers (a few ten-thousandths of an inch).
The images that are combined to produce this view have been processed to remove geometrical distortion associated with the camera's 45-degree field of view. In addition, special image processing has been applied to enhance the clouds and make them visible across the entire mosaic. The rim of Endurance was processed using the same technique, illustrating how much enhancement was done. Glare from the Sun washed out the clouds on the left in the original images; this glare was removed.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has been analyzing sulfur-rich rocks and surface materials in the "Columbia Hills" in Gusev Crater on Mars. This image shows rocky debris and dust, which planetary scientists call "regolith" or "soil," that has been churned up by the rover wheels. This 40-centimeter-wide (16-inch-wide) patch of churned-up dirt, nicknamed "Paso Robles," contains brighter patches measured to be high in sulfur by Spirit's alpha particle X-ray Spectrometer. Spirit's panoramic camera took this false-color image on martian day, or sol, 400 (Feb. 16, 2005), using filters at wavelengths of 750, 530, and 430 nanometers. Darker red hues in the image correspond to greater concentrations of oxidized soil and dust. Whiter and bluer hues correspond to sulfur-rich deposits that are not as heavily coated with soils or are not as highly oxidized.
This animated piece illustrates the recent escape of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity from dangerous, loose material on the vast plains leading to the rover's next long-term target, "Victoria Crater."
A series of images from the front and rear hazard-avoidance cameras make up this brief movie chronicling the challenge Opportunity faced to free itself from the ripple dubbed "Jammerbugt." Each quadrant shows one of the rover's four corner wheels: left front wheel in upper left, right front wheel in upper right, rear wheels in the lower quadrants. The wheels became partially embedded in the ripple at the end of a drive on Opportunity's 833rd Martian day, or sol (May 28, 2006). The images in this clip were taken on sols 836 through 841 (May 31 through June 5, 2006).
Scientists and engineers who had been elated at the meters of progress the rover had been making in earlier drives were happy for even centimeters of advance per sol as they maneuvered their explorer through the slippery material of Jammerbugt. The wheels reached solid footing on a rock outcrop on the final sol of this sequence.
The science and engineering teams appropriately chose the ripple's informal from name the name of a bay on the north coast of Denmark. Jammerbugt, or Jammerbugten, loosely translated, means Bay of Lamentation or Bay of Wailing. The shipping route from the North Sea to the Baltic passes Jammerbugt on its way around the northern tip of Jutland. This has always been an important trade route and many ships still pass by the bay. The prevailing wind directions are typically northwest to southwest with the strongest winds and storms tending to blow from the northwest. A northwesterly wind will blow straight into the Jammerbugt, towards shore. Therefore, in the age of sail, many ships sank there during storms. The shore is sandy, but can have strong waves, so running aground was very dangerous even though there are no rocks.
Fortunately, Opportunity weathered its "Jammerbugt" and is again on its way toward Victoria Crater.
Researchers used the rover Spirit's rock abrasion tool to help them study a rock dubbed "Uchben" in the "Columbia Hills" of Mars. The tool ground into the rock, creating a shallow hole 4.5 centimeters (1.8 inches) in diameter in the central upper portion of this image. It also used wire bristles to brush a portion of the surface below and to the right of the hole. Spirit used its panoramic camera during the rover's 293rd martian day (Oct. 29, 2004) to take the frames combined into this approximately true-color image.
During recent soil-brushing experiments, the rock abrasion tool on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit became covered with dust, as shown here. An abundance of iron oxide minerals in the dust gave the device a reddish-brown veneer. Investigators were using the rock abrasion tool to uncover successive layers of soil in an attempt to reveal near-surface stratigraphy. Afterward, remnant dirt clods were visible on both the bit and the brush of the tool. Designers of the rock abrasion tool at Honeybee Robotics and engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed a plan to run the brush on the rock abrasion tool in reverse to dislodge the dirt and return the tool to normal operation. Subsequent communications with the rover revealed that the procedure is working and the rock abrasion tool remains healthy.
Spirit acquired this approximately true-color image with the panoramic camera on the rover's 893rd sol, or Martian day (July 8, 2006). The image combines exposures taken through three of the camera's filters, centered on wavelengths of 750 nanometers, 530 nanometers, and 430 nanometers.
This view was assembled from images taken by the navigation camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit during the rover's 337th martian day, or sol (Dec. 14, 2004). Spirit's position, catalogued as Site 100 for the mission, was on the slope of "Husband Hill." The rover had driven 6 meters (20 feet) on Sol 337 after examining a rock called "Wishstone" for several sols. That rock is just to the left of the top of the arch traced by the rover tracks in this view. Spirit experienced slippage of up to 80 percent on uphill portions of the day's drive. The view is presented here in a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
This image taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows a target dubbed "Drammensfjorden" on a rock called "Millstone" in "Endurance Crater." Opportunity dug a hole into the target with its rock abrasion tool, then captured this picture with its microscopic imager on sol 162 (July 8, 2004). The image mosaic is about 6 centimeters (2.4 inches) across.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity recently stopped to analyze an exposure of rock near "Beagle Crater," on a target nicknamed "Baltra." Nearly 100 sols, or Martian days, had passed since Opportunity had last analyzed one of the now-familiar rock exposures seen on the Plains of Meridiani. The rover ground a 3-millimeter-deep (0.12-inch-deep) hole in the rock using the rock abrasion tool on sol 893 (July 29, 2006) while stationed about 25 meters (82 feet) from the southwest rim of Beagle Crater.
Scientists wanted to analyze the outcrop one more time before driving the rover onto the ring of smooth material surrounding "Victoria Crater." Opportunity's analysis showed the rock to be very similar in its elemental composition to other exposures encountered during the rover's southward trek across Meridiani Planum.
Opportunity acquired the image data shown here shortly after noon on Mars on sol 896 (Aug. 1, 2006) with the panoramic camera (Pancam), after backing up 1 meter (3.3 feet) from Baltra to assure that the target was in sunlight. This is a false-color image, made using the Pancam's 753-nanometer, 535-nanometer, and 432-nanometer filters. The false color emphasizes differences in rock and soil materials.
This view of Victoria crater is looking north from "Duck Bay" towards the dramatic promontory called "Cape Verde." The dramatic cliff of layered rocks is about 50 meters (about 165 feet) away from the rover and is about 6 meters (about 20 feet) tall. The taller promontory beyond that is about 100 meters (about 325 feet) away, and the vista beyond that extends away for more than 400 meters (about 1300 feet) into the distance. This is an approximately true color rendering of images taken by the panoramic camera (Pancam) on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity during the rover's 952nd sol, or Martian day, (Sept. 28, 2006) using the camera's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer filters.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit looked up at the "Columbia Hills" from its location on the 265th martian day, or sol, of its mission (Sept. 30, 2004) and captured this view. This cropped mosaic image, presented here in a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction, was taken by the rover's navigation camera.
This picture from the microscopic imager on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is a mosaic of a target called "Gagarin" on a rock referred to as "Yuri." Opportunity brushed the target with the rock abrasion tool during the rover's 401st martian day, or sol, (March 10, 2005) and then took the individual images that are combined into this mosaic. The rock abrasion tool ground into the same target on the following sol.
The circle from which the tool's wire brush has scoured dust off the rock surface is about 5 centimeters (2 inches) in diameter.
This rock is near the rim of "Vostok" crater. Yuri Gagarin was the first man to orbit Earth. The Russian cosmonaut's spacecraft was named Vostok NASA/JPL/Cornell/USGS1.
Click on the image for Impressive Impact (QTVR)
This stunning image features the heat shield impact site of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. This is an approximately true-color mosaic of panoramic camera images taken through the camera's 750-, 530-, and 430-nanometer filters.
The mosaic was acquired on Opportunity's sol 330 (Dec. 28, 2004), shortly after Opportunity arrived to investigate the site where its heat shield hit the ground south of "Endurance Crater" on Jan. 24, 2004. On the left, the main heat shield piece is inverted and reveals its metallic insulation layer, glinting in the sunlight. The main piece stands about 1 meter tall (about 3.3 feet) and about 13 meters (about 43 feet) from the rover.
The other large, flat piece of debris near the center of the image is about 14 meters (about 46 feet) away. The circular feature on the right side of the image is the crater made by the heat shield's impact. It is about 2.8 meters (9.2 feet) in diameter but only about 5 to 10 centimeters (about 2 to 4 inches) deep. The crater is about 6 meters (about 20 feet) from Opportunity in this view. Smaller fragments and debris can be seen all around the impact site.
The impact excavated a large amount of reddish subsurface material. Darker materials cover part of the crater's flat floor and have formed a streak or jet of material pointing toward the two largest heat shield fragments.
On the 421st martian day, or sol, of its time on Mars (March 31,2005), NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity drove to within about 10 meters (33 feet) of a small crater called "Viking." After completing the day's 71-meter (233-foot) drive across flatland of the Meridiani Planum region, the rover used its navigation camera to take images combined into this view of its new surroundings, including the crater. That day was the last of Opportunity's second extended mission. On April 1, both Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, began third extensions approved by NASA for up to 18 more months of exploring Mars. This view is presented in a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
The image has been corrected to counteract the tilt at which Spirit was standing when the image was taken.
This image taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit shows an outcrop of layered bedrock in the "Columbia Hills." It was taken by the rover's panoramic camera on sol 217 (Aug. 13, 2004).
At a rock called "Clovis," the rock abrasion tool on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit cut a 9-millimeter (0.35-inch) hole during the rover's 216th martian day, or sol (Aug. 11, 2004). The hole is the deepest drilled in a rock on Mars so far. This false color view was made from images taken by Spirit's panoramic camera on sol 226 (Aug. 21, 2004) at around 12:50 p.m. local true solar time -- early afternoon in Gusev Crater on Mars. To the right is a "brush flower" of circles produced by scrubbing the surface of the rock with the abrasion tool's wire brush. Scientists used rover's Moessbauer spectrometer and alpha particle X-ray spectrometer to look for iron-bearing minerals and determine the elemental chemical composition of the rock. This composite combines images taken with the camera's 750-, 530-, and 430-nanometer filters. The grayish-blue hue in this image suggests that the interior of the rock contains iron minerals that are less oxidized than minerals on the surface. The diameter of the hole cut into the rock is 4.5 centimeters (1.8 inches).
NASA'S Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this westward view from atop a low plateau where Sprit spent the closing months of 2007.
After several months near the base of the plateau called "Home Plate" in the inner basin of the Columbia Hills range inside Gusev Crater, Spirit climbed onto the eastern edge of the plateau during the rover's 1,306th Martian day, or sol, (Sept. 5, 2007). It examined rocks and soils at several locations on the southern half of Home Plate during September and October. It was perched near the western edge of Home Plate when it used its panoramic camera (Pancam) to take the images used in this view on sols 1,366 through 1,369 (Nov. 6 through Nov. 9, 2007). With its daily solar-energy supply shrinking as Martian summer turned to fall, Spirit then drove to the northern edge of Home Plate for a favorable winter haven. The rover reached that northward-tilting site in December, in time for the fourth Earth-year anniversary of its landing on Mars. Spirit reached Mars on Jan. 4, 2004, Universal Time (Jan. 3, 2004, Pacific Standard Time). It landed at a site at about the center of the horizon in this image.
This panorama covers a scene spanning left to right from southwest to northeast. The western edge of Home Plate is in the foreground, generally lighter in tone than the more distant parts of the scene. A rock-dotted hill in the middle distance across the left third of the image is "Tsiolkovski Ridge," about 30 meters or 100 feet from the edge of Home Plate and about that same distance across. A bump on the horizon above the left edge of Tsiolkovski Ridge is "Grissom Hill," about 8 kilometers or 5 miles away. At right, the highest point of the horizon is "Husband Hill," to the north and about 800 meters or half a mile away.
This view combines separate images taken through Pancam filters centered on wavelengths of 753 nanometers, 535 nanometers and 432 nanometers to produce an approximately true-color panorama.
Voir l'image PIA10216: Spirit's West Valley Panorama sur le site de la NASA.
At the Gusev site recently, skies have been very dusty, and on its 421st sol (March 10, 2005) NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit spied two dust devils in action. This pair of images is from the rover's rear hazard-avoidance camera.Views of the Gusev landing region from orbit show many dark streaks across the landscape -- tracks where dust devils have removed surface dust to show relatively darker soil below -- but this is the first time Spirit has photographed an active dust devil.
Scientists are considering several causes of these small phenomena. Dust devils often occur when the Sun heats the surface of Mars. Warmed soil and rocks heat the layer of atmosphere closest to the surface, and the warm air rises in a whirling motion, stirring dust up from the surface like a miniature tornado. Another possibility is that a flow structure might develop over craters as wind speeds increase. As winds pick up, turbulence eddies and rotating columns of air form. As these columns grow in diameter they become taller and gain rotational speed. Eventually they become self-sustaining and the wind blows them down range.
One sol before this image was taken, power output from Spirit's solar panels went up by about 50 percent when the amount of dust on the panels decreased. Was this a coincidence, or did a helpful dust devil pass over Spirit and lift off some of the dust?
By comparing the separate images from the rover's different cameras, team members estimate that the dust devils moved about 500 meters (1,640 feet) in the 155 seconds between the navigation camera and hazard-avoidance camera frames; that equates to about 3 meters per second (7 miles per hour). The dust devils appear to be about 1,100 meters (almost three-quarters of a mile) from the rover.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity captured this view from the base of "Burns Cliff" during the rover's 280th martian day (Nov. 6, 2004). This cliff in the inner wall of "Endurance Crater" displays multiple layers of bedrock for the rover to examine with its panoramic camera and miniature thermal emission spectrometer. The rover team has decided that the farthest Opportunity can safely advance along the base of the cliff is close to the squarish white rock near the center of this image. After examining the site for a few days from that position, the the rover will turn around and head out of the crater. The view is a mosaic of frames taken by Opportunity's navigation camera. The rover was on ground with a slope of about 30 degrees when the pictures were taken, and the view is presented here in a way that corrects for that tilt of the camera.
Planetary scientists got excited when they saw this imagery coming in from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit because they could see hints of rock strata and other interesting geologic features ahead. In the middle of this image, from upper left to the lower right, lies a trough that resembles a small ravine. To the right of that and a little way up the hill, beyond a rock-strewn surface, sits a small rounded ridge. Fine horizontal streaks, just perceptible in this image, suggest possible layering in the bedrock. Above that are rock features that appear to drape across the slopes. Scientists are discussing whether to take the rover closer or select other interesting targets for further study. This view looks eastward from the "West Spur" of the "Columbia Hills," where Spirit has been conducting scientific investigations. It is a mosaic of several frames Spirit took with its panoramic camera on the rover's 229th martian day, or sol, (Aug. 24, 2004). The field of view is 48 degrees from left to right. The image is presented in a cylindrical projection with geometrical seam correction.
This view of "Victoria crater" is looking southeast from "Duck Bay" towards the dramatic promontory called "Cabo Frio." The small crater in the right foreground, informally known as "Sputnik," is about 20 meters (about 65 feet) away from the rover, the tip of the spectacular, layered, Cabo Frio promontory itself is about 200 meters (about 650 feet) away from the rover, and the exposed rock layers are about 15 meters (about 50 feet) tall. This is an approximately true color rendering of images taken by the panoramic camera (Pancam) on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity during the rover's 952nd sol, or Martian day, (Sept. 28, 2006) using the camera's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer filters.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit drove up to this outcrop, called "Jibsheet," on the flank of "Husband Hill," in early March 2005. This view of Jibsheet by Spirit's panoramic camera is presented in false color.
Another of the best examples of spectacular cross-bedding in Victoria crater are the outcrops at Cape St. Mary, which is an approximately 15 m (45 foot) high promontory located along the western rim of Victoria crater and near the beginning of the rover's traverse around the rim. Like the Cape St. Vincent images, these Pancam super-resolution images have allowed scientists to discern that the rocks at Victoria Crater once represented a large dune field that migrated across this region.
This is a Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity Panoramic Camera image mosaic acquired on sol 1213 (June 23, 2007), and was constructed from a mathematical combination of 32 different blue filter (480 nm) images.
Voir l'image PIA10211: Cape St. Mary sur le site de la NASA.
Annotated Version
Click on the image for full view
This 360-degree panorama shows the vista from the location where NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has spent its third Martian southern-hemisphere winter inside Mars' Gusev Crater. The rover's overwintering location is on the northern edge of a low plateau informally called "Home Plate," which is about 80 meters or 260 feet in diameter.
This view combines 246 different exposures taken with Spirit's panoramic camera (Pancam)—82 pointings, with three filters at each pointing. Spirit took the first of these frames during the mission's 1,477th Martian day, or sol, (February 28, 2008) two weeks after the rover made its last move to reach the location where it would stop driving for the winter. Solar energy at Gusev Crater is so limited during the Martian winter that Spirit does not generate enough electricity to drive, nor even enough to take many images per day. The last frame for this mosaic was taken on Sol 1691 (October 5, 2008). Spirit began moving again on Sol 1709 (October 23, 2008), inching uphill to adjust the angle of its solar panels for the last portion of the winter.
The hill on the horizon at far right is Husband Hill, to the north. Spirit acquired a 360-degree panorama (see PIA03610) from the summit of Husband Hill during August 2005). The hill dominating the left portion of the image is McCool Hill. Husband and McCool hills are two of the seven principal hills in the Columbia Hills range within Gusev Crater. Home Plate is in the inner basin of the range.
The northwestern edge of Home Plate is visible in the right foreground. The blockier, more sharply shadowed texture there is layered sandstone whose layering is tilted inward toward the edge of the Home Plate platform. The northeastern edge of Home Plate is visible in the left foreground. Spirit first climbed onto Home Plate on that region, in early 2006.
Rover tracks from driving by Spirit are visible on Home Plate in the center and right of the image. These were made during Spirit's second exploration on top of the plateau, which began when Spirit climbed onto the southern edge of Home Plate in September 2007.
In the center foreground, the turret of tools at the end of Spirit's robotic arm appears in duplicate because the arm was repositioned between the days when the images making up that part of the mosaic were taken. On the horizon above the turret, to the south, is a small hill capped with a light-toned outcrop. This hill is called "Von Braun," and it is a possible destination for Spirit during the upcoming Martian southern-hemisphere summer. The flat horizon in the right-hand portion of the panorama is the basaltic plain onto which Spirit landed on January 4, 2004 (Universal Time; January 3, 2004, Pacific Standard Time).
This is an approximate true-color, red-green-blue composite panorama generated from images taken through the Pancam's 600-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 480-nanometer filters. This "natural color" view is the rover team's best estimate of what the scene would look like if we were there and able to see it with our own eyes.
Voir l'image PIA11746: Full-Circle 'Bonestell' Panorama from Spirit sur le site de la NASA.
This 360-degree view combines frames taken by the navigation camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit during the rover's 271st martian day, or sol, on Oct. 7, 2004. The rover had just driven into position for using the tools on its robotic arm (not in the picture) to examine a layered rock called "Tetl" in the "Columbia Hills." Spirit's total driving distance from its landing to this point was 3,641 meters (2.26 miles), more than six times the distance set as a criterion for mission success. The view is presented here in a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
As NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit began collecting images for a 360-degree panorama of new terrain, the rover captured this view of a dark boulder with an interesting surface texture. The boulder sits about 40 centimeters (16 inches) tall on Martian sand about 5 meters (16 feet) away from Spirit. It is one of many dark, volcanic rock fragments -- many pocked with rounded holes called vesicles -- littering the slope of "Low Ridge." The rock surface facing the rover is similar in appearance to the surface texture on the outside of lava flows on Earth.
Spirit took this approximately true-color image with the panoramic camera on the rover's 810th sol, or Martian day, of exploring Mars (April 13, 2006), using the camera's 753-nanometer, 535-nanometer, and 432-nanometer filters.
This map shows the traverse of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity through the rover's 205th martian day, or sol (Aug. 21, 2004). The background image is from the rover's descent imaging camera. Images inset along the route are from Opportunity's navigation camera. Opportunity began its exploration inside "Eagle" crater near the left edge of the map. Following completion of its study of the outcrop there, it traversed eastward to a small crater ("Fram" crater) before driving southeastward to the rim of "Endurance" crater. After a survey partly around the south rim of Endurance crater, Opportunity drove inside the southwest rim of Endurance crater and began a systematic study of outcrops exposed on the crater's inner slope.
Opportunity is approaching the heat shield that protected the rover from frictional high temperatures during descent through the martian atmosphere in January 2004. The spacecraft carrying the rover jettisoned the heat shield just prior to landing. This orbital view shows the course the rover drove from its landing to its 324th martian day, or sol (Dec. 21, 2004), including the historic path of Opportunity's six months of exploration inside Endurance Crater. Opportunity drove 90.9 meters (298 feet) on sol 324, bringing its total odometry to 1,997.8 meters (1.24 miles).
This movie clip shows a dust devil scooting across a plain inside Gusev Crater on Mars as seen from the NASA rover Spirit's hillside vantage point during the rover's 459th martian day, or sol (April 18, 2005). The individual images were taken about 20 seconds apart by Spirit's navigation camera, and the contrast has been enhanced for anything in the images that changes from frame to frame, that is, for the dust devil.
The movie results from a new way of watching for dust devils, which are whirlwinds that hoist dust from the surface into the air. Spirit began seeing dust devils in isolated images in March 2005. At first, the rover team relied on luck. It might catch a dust devil in an image or it might miss by a few minutes. Using the new detection strategy, the rover takes a series of 21 images. Spirit sends a few of them to Earth, as well as little thumbnail images of all of them. Team members use the 3 big images and all the small images to decide whether the additional big images have dust devils. For this movie, they specifically told Spirit to send back frames that they knew had dust devils.
The images were processed in three steps. All images were calibrated to remove known camera artifacts. The images were then processed to remove stationary objects. The result is a gray scene showing only features that change with time. The final step combined the original image with the image that shows only moving features, showing the martian scene and the enhanced dust devils.
Scientists expected dust devils since before Spirit landed. The landing area inside Gusev Crater is filled with dark streaks left behind when dust devils pick dust up from an area. It is also filled with bright "hollows," which are dust-filled miniature craters. Dust covers most of the terrain. Winds flow into and out of Gusev crater every day. The Sun heats the surface so that the surface is warm to the touch even though the atmosphere at 2 meters (6 feet) above the surface would be chilly. That temperature contrast causes convection. Mixing the dust, winds, and convection should trigger dust devils.
Scientists will use the images to study several things. Tracking the dust devils tells which way the wind blows at different times of day. Statistics on the size of typical dust devils will help with estimates of how much dust they pump into the atmosphere every day. By watching individual dust devils change as they go over more-dusty and less-dusty terrain, researchers can learn about the turbulent motion near the surface. Ultimately, that motion of wind and dust near the surface relates these small dust devils with Mars' large dust storms.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its navigation camera to take the images combined into this view of the rover's surroundings on Opportunity's 387th martian day, or sol (Feb. 24, 2005). Opportunity had driven about 73 meters (240 feet) and reached the eastern edge of a small crater dubbed "Naturaliste," seen in the right foreground. This view is presented in a cylindrical projection with geometric and brightness seam correction.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its navigation camera during the rover's 1,278th Martian day, or sol, (Aug. 28, 2007) to take the images combined into this view. The rover was perched at the lip of Victoria Crater, which is about 800 meters (one-half mile) in diameter.
After assessment of possible routes for Opportunity to descend into the crater, the rover team selected a site farther to the right along the rim. That selected entry point lies near the ripple of bright soil visible just outside the crater near the top center of this scene. The driving distance for Opportunity from the Sol 1,278 viewpoint to the selected entry point is about 40 meters (about 130 feet).
This view is presented as a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
This is a portion of an image called the "McMurdo Panorama," taken by the panoramic camera on NASA's Spirit rover during its winter campaign of 2006. The view is looking toward the north at "Husband Hill," the dark-toned "El Dorado" dune field and the light-toned "Home Plate" feature. Husband Hill is approximately 850 meters (2,800 feet) from the rover's winter campaign site. Wind-blown ripples are evident in the field in the foreground, along with vesicular basalt rock. Tracks made by Spirit as it left Home Plate are also visible.
The McMurdo Panorama PIA01907 was acquired over several months while Spirit was on "Low Ridge." It required all of the camera's geology filters and covered 360 degrees in azimuth. This view is in false color, with blue, green and red representing data collected through 430-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 750-nanometer filters, respectively.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its navigation camera to take the images combined into this 360-degree view of the rover's surroundings on the 398th martian day, or sol, of its surface mission (March 7, 2005). Opportunity drove 95 meters (312 feet) toward "Vostok Crater" that sol before taking the images. The drive was done in four steps: three "blind-drive" segments followed by a segment using the rover's autonomous navigation. This location is catalogued as Opportunity's site 49. The view is presented in a cylindrical projection with geometric seam correction.
Click on the image for 'Wopmay' Rock (QTVR)
This approximate true-color image taken by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows an unusual, lumpy rock informally named "Wopmay" on the lower slopes of "Endurance Crater." The rock was named after the Canadian bush pilot Wilfrid Reid "Wop" May. Like "Escher" and other rocks dotting the bottom of Endurance, scientists believe the lumps in Wopmay may be related to cracking and alteration processes, possibly caused by exposure to water. The area between intersecting sets of cracks eroded in a way that created the lumpy appearance. Rover team members plan to drive Opportunity over to Wopmay for a closer look in coming sols. This image was taken by the rover's panoramic camera on sol 248 (Oct. 4, 2004), using its 750-, 530- and 480-nanometer filters.
