Bruce Murray Space Image Library

Opportunity "Santorini" Panorama, sols 1716-1719

Opportunity "Santorini" Panorama, sols 1716-1719
Opportunity "Santorini" Panorama, sols 1716-1719 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. It shows a typical Meridiani Planum landscape of fractured light-toned bedrock exposed in the swales of dark sand dunes. 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 1 meter. 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 from sols 1716 to 1719 (21 to 24 Nov 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. NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell