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The Planetary Society Blog

By Emily Lakdawalla

Pretty picture: Opportunity around Concepcion

Feb. 9, 2010 | 09:32 PST | 17:32 UTC

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Here's a neat picture from Opportunity, a panorama composed of its wide-angle, mast-mounted Navcam cameras, showing the crater Concepcion. In this one I particularly like the parallel slices cut through a low dune by Oppy's wheels as she cut over to begin her clockwise circumnavigation of the crater. In front of her are the three cubic ejecta blocks named "Chocolate Hills."

Click to enlarge >

Concepcion crater, Opportunity sol 2147
On sol 2,147 (February 6, 2010), Opportunity had shifted around the small, fresh crater named Concepcion to check out some of its ejecta blocks. Credit: NASA / JPL / Damien Bouic

Opportunity captured a color view of the rocks from this position. There's a bit of a rind on the leftmost block, which might have been some mineral filling a fracture in the rock before the crater formed. In color, that rind is very clearly revealed to be a map of North and Central America, including Baja California, with a little less distinct mappery of part of Europe, perhaps even Australasia to the right. The martian cartographers need to go study that part of Earth a bit more. (At least that's what I see -- what do you see?)

Click to enlarge >

Chocolate Hills
Opportunity captured this view of the ejecta blocks named "Chocolate Hills" from Concepcion crater on Sol 2147 (February 6, 2010). Credit: NASA / JPL / Cornell / color composite by Stuart Atkinson

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Clear proof that the little red people enjoy a joke.

#1 - Stephen Mackenzie - 02/09/2010 - 09:54

Chocolate Hills Map

I guess the martian cartographers died out when Florida was covered with water many millenia ago

#2 - Rich Stevens - 02/09/2010 - 10:47

Pattern-finding

I have seen better, but it probably depends what you are used to... Clearly South America has not ripened yet.

Cassini managed to find the east coast of Britain on Titan, to my eyes, enhanced by the apparent cloud cover over the rest of the island.

#3 - Jon Wharf - 02/09/2010 - 12:04

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