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The Planetary Society Blog
By Emily Lakdawalla
The view from Spirit
Jun. 14, 2006 | 16:13 PDT | 23:13 UTC
I was thumbing through the recent images from Spirit and Opportunity and came across this striking view. Spirit is parked for the winter, and is taking advantage of the position to acquire the mother of all panoramic views of the Martian surface. Here's what A. J. S. Rayl had to say about this view in her second-most-recent Mars Exploration Rover update: "Spirit is into the winter campaign now, informed [Steve] Squyres, and having the time to actually do real in-depth studies is something the team is enthusiastically welcoming. 'The first phase of the winter campaign consists of two sets of activities: one is acquiring what's probably going to be the biggest panorama we've ever done, the McMurdo pan. That's going to be all 13 filters -- all the colors we've got -- and for a number of filters it will be uncompressed data, so it'll be extremely high resolution.' The mosaicked panorama will ultimately be comprised of some 1,500 images that will take weeks to acquire and weeks to dowload, he added,'but it's going to be a really remarkable dataset.' In adtion to being something for all human eyes to behold, these and other Pancam images will provide important information about the nature and origin of surrounding rocks and soils in this area of Gusev Crater."
Fragment of Spirit's "McMurdo panorama," sols 855-867While parked at its winter quarters in 2006, Spirit worked on capturing the largest panorama ever -- a 360-degree view of the surroundings through all 13 filters at very high resolution. This fragment of the "McMurdo panorama" consists of 16 individual frames captured over sols 856 to 869 (May 31 to June 11, 2006). Although the view is through the rover's red, green, and blue filters, it is not correctly calibrated, making the sky appear blue and enhancing color variations in the rocks and soils. Credit: NASA / JPL / Cornell / Midnight Mars Browser |
Do please note that the robin's-egg-blue sky results from incorrect calibration of the images, and does not represent the actual sky color on Mars -- which, I guess, is why this view so suprised me. It looks so familiar, except that the rover tracks in the foreground tell you clearly that Spirit or Opportunity captured this image. (Actually, even if it weren't obvious from the mountains in the background, you could tell instantly that it's Spirit from those tracks -- that dead wheel digs a smooth trench in the soil wherever Spirit goes.) Look at all the subtle color variations in the hills. Lovely.
I also was amused by this three-image view from Spirit. Spirit takes lots of pictures of its calibration target. Most of the time, the high-gain antenna is not in the field of view, but sometimes it is. This time, not only was the high-gain antenna in the field of view, but it was moving while Spirit was taking a full 13-filter set of calibration target images. So you can see the antenna shift position in these three shots from Spirit's right eye. The corner chips on the calibration target flicker a little because we're looking through several different-color filters. Rover images catch a lot of movement of the wheels and the robotic arm and of the landscape as the rover drives on, but this is the first set of images I've noticed where you can see that antenna move. Neat. (Thanks to Tom Swilius for the heads-up on this one!)Moving high-gain antennaIn this three-image sequence from Spirit, the rover's high-gain antenna can be seen to move from frame to frame. The three images were captured through three different filters on the rover's right Panoramic Camera on sol 867 (June 11, 2006) at 11:22 local solar time. Credit: NASA / JPL / Emily Lakdawalla |
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