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Planetary News: Mars Exploration Rovers (2006)

New Image: Most Detailed Panorama Yet to Celebrate Spirit's 1,000th Martian Day

 

October 25, 2006

To honor the long-lived Mars Exploration Rover Spirit completing its 1,000th Martian day Thursday, NASA released this color 360-degree panorama -- produced from the most detailed images yet by either Spirit or its twin, Opportunity -- showing the rugged terrain of Spirit's current location amid a range of hills. The vista, called the "McMurdo" panorama, comes from the panoramic camera (Pancam) on Spirit.

McMurdo Panorama on the Occasion of Spirit's 1,000th Sol
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McMurdo Panorama on the Occasion of Spirit's 1,000th Sol
October 26, 2006, marks Spirit's 1,000th sol of what was planned as a 90-sol mission. The McMurdo panorama was released to celebrate this milestone. This is an approximately 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. Credit: NASA / JPL / Cornell

The Pancam began shooting component images of this panorama during Spirit's sol 814 (April 18, 2006) and completed the part shown here on sol 932 (August 17, 2006). The panorama was acquired using all 13 of the Pancam's color filters, using lossless compression for the red and blue stereo filters, and only modest levels of compression on the remaining filters. The overall panorama consists of 1,449 Pancam images and represents a raw data volume of nearly 500 megabytes. It is thus the largest, highest-fidelity view of Mars acquired from either rover. Additional photo coverage of the parts of the rover deck not shown here was completed on sol 980 (October 5 , 2006). The team is completing the processing of those final pieces of the panorama, and that image will be released shortly.

Very high resolution versions of this image are available on JPL's Planetary Photojournal.

Spirit has been examining the surroundings for several months while perched with a tilt to the north for maximum solar energy during winter in Mars' southern hemisphere. The rover has lived through the most challenging part of its second Martian winter, and its solar power levels are rising again. Spring in the southern hemisphere of Mars will begin in early 2007. Before that, the rover team hopes to start driving Spirit again toward scientifically interesting places in the "Inner Basin" and "Columbia Hills" inside Gusev crater. The McMurdo panorama is providing team members with key pieces of scientific and topographic information for choosing where Spirit will next explore.

Find out more about Spirit's and Opportunity's recent adventures, and hear from Pancam lead Jim Bell as he describes putting together the McMurdo panorama.

This beautiful scene reveals a tremendous amount of detail in Spirit's surroundings. Many dark, porous-textured volcanic rocks can be seen around the rover, including many on Low Ridge. Two rocks to the right of center, brighter and smoother-looking in this image and more reflective in infrared observations by Spirit's miniature thermal emission spectrometer, are thought to be meteorites. On the right, "Husband Hill" on the horizon, the rippled "El Dorado" sand dune field near the base of that hill, and lighter-toned "Home Plate" below the dunes provide context for Spirit's travels since mid-2005. Left of center, tracks and a trench dug by Spirit's right-front wheel, which no longer rotates, have exposed bright underlying material. This bright material is evidence of sulfur-rich salty minerals in the subsurface, which may provide clues about the watery past of this part of Gusev Crater.

Spirit landed inside Mars' Gusev Crater on January 3, 2004, PST (January 4 Universal Time). Each Martian day is longer than an Earth day, lasting 24 hours, 39 minutes, 35 seconds.  That means that in Earth days, Spirit has been on Mars about 1,026 days.

"Sol 1,000 has been more a worry than anything else, because all the sudden we've got 4-digit sol numbers -- and that's something our software was never set up to handle," Steve Squyres, lead scientist for the rovers, told The Planetary Society. "It's the S1K problem -- is our software going to break when we have to handle 4-digit sol numbers?" Will Spirit survive S1K? Check back to find out.