Martian Vistas

Opportunity spent the time around Curiosity's landing parked in a fracture like feature at the edge of Cape York known as Whim Creek. Here is a mosaic of the images taken of the feature while she was there.

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On sol 3 Curiosity took a spectacular colour mosaic using the Mastcam 34 colour camera. However this is made up of 130 tiny thumbnail images as the full resolution ones have not been sent from Mars yet. This means that the greyscale navcam panorama is of much higher resolution. HereI have tried to combine the two, using the colour information from Mastcam to colour the greyscale navcam images. It is difficult reproject these so they overlay accurately and I have't been entirely successful, however I think it gives a great impression of what is to come.

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Some more of the first navcam panorama has come down making a wonderful image of the rover sitting on the surface and also some great views over towards Mt Sharp/Aeolis Mons Curiosity's primary target.

Left Navcam

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Half Resolution (2661 x 891) ( 654kB )
Quarter Resolution (1330 x 445) ( 155kB )

Anaglyph (red/blue 3D glasses required)

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Half Resolution (2158 x 892) ( 701kB )
Quarter Resolution (1079 x 446) ( 179kB )

Wow! The first navcam images from Curiosity are down after deploying the mast on sol 2. Here are the first two full resolution images joined together, showing the nearby terrain and the Gale crater rim mountains on the horizon. Unbelievable! On Mars, on Mars, on Mars.

Left navcam camera

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Right navcam camera

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Anaglyph (red/blue 3D glasses required)

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Now that the front hazcam image is down the two can be combined to form a rough and incomplete 360 degree panorama due to the very wide field of view of these cameras.

Full size image

MSL Curiosity landed! Here is my initial processing of the sol 0 hazcam image.

The only one 512x512 image taken with the dust covers off made it down in the Odyssey pass after landing. The automatic contrast stretching applied to the image before being posted on the raw image site made it hard to see anything as the setting sun was in the image.

The team at JPL posted a processed version of the raw data which was much better.

However this over exposes the sky and more importantly most of the rim mountains of Gale Crater! This can be retreved from the 'raw' version and combined to produce this view.

Knowing the hazcam field of view (124 degrees) this can then be reprojected to produce a less distorted view with a flat(isn) horizon.

A small crater that Opportunity passed recently at Cape York

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Opportunity is currently parked at the northern tip of Cape York studying the geologic contact at it's edge. This is a mosaic taken recently of a section of the ground nearby known as 'Veladero'.

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Morris Hill, the high point of Cape York just to the south of Opportunity's winter parking spot at Greeley Haven.

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Opportunity has just rolled up to an outcrop near the summit/ridge of Cape York called Turkey Haven where she'll conduct scientific studies over the American Thanksgiving holiday (hence the target name). This mosaic was taken a few sols ago and Oppy has now driven forward and is parked right on top of these rocks, with her IDD near the outcrop section on the left.

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Half Resolution (2445 x 866) ( 806kB )
Quarter Resolution (1222 x 433) ( 195kB )