The much-anticipated full-colour panoramic view of Spirit’s landing site on Mars was unveiled late on Monday.
The colours are as would be seen by a person visiting Mars – click for full panorama (Image: NASA/JPL/Cornell)
It was created from 225 individual images, each 1024 by 1024 pixels. The highly detailed view it provides of the planet’s surface around NASA’s lander will be a crucial tool for the scientists planning the rover’s first days of exploration. Its completion was considered one of the mission’s top priorities.
Detailed calibration will take more time, but the image is “approximately true color” as it would be seen by a person, said Michael Malin, the image specialist who computer stitched the panorama together.
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The full dataset includes panoramas taken through 14 different colour filters, to aid in the identification of rock types. Furthermore, the whole scene is duplicated by two side-by-side cameras to provide three-dimensional views.
Scientists have already reconstructed a 3-D view of one small patch of ground, where the airbags scraped across the soil as they were retracted. The disturbed soil there has puzzled the science team because it appears to have folded and bunched like a piece of carpet. “This is soft material that also behaves cohesively,” says team member John Grotzinger of MIT.
Deep impact
Any fears that the site would lack interesting targets for investigation have long been dispelled. As Malin put it, there are so many tantalising places to probe that “the problem is we have too many directions to go in”.
Among the most tempting is the rim of a large crater just 250 metres away. It appears to be surrounded by large boulders thrown out by the impact that created it. These represent samples from several tens of metres depth and could reveal much about the area’s geological history.
The lander will continue to take daily pictures when it begins its travels, but the panorama will be one of the few times such a comprehensive view is obtained, Malin said.
And, because Spirit is expected to roll of its 50-centimetre-high landing platform on Wednesday or Thursday, this is the last time it will ever have such a high vantage point.
