Emily Lakdawalla • Feb 01, 2010
A pretty picture of Concepcion crater
It looks like the rover team thinks Concepcion is pretty enough (in both aesthetic and a scientific senses) to be worthy of the full-color Pancam panorama treatment; color frames started arriving on Earth over the weekend. Here is just the beginning of the Concepcion panorama, which will be really lovely when it's done:
There will be two great things about this panorama: the little crater with its rays, and the view on the horizon. There are distant, hazy hills out there, and some of them are on Endeavour crater, Opportunity's eventual goal. Here's a map put together by James Canvin that shows how some of the mountains are on the near rim of the crater, while others are on the far rim, and others belong to another crater entirely, Iazu. Watching these hills grow is going to be a really exciting component of Opportunity's continuing drive south.