NASA has released a new panorama from its Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, showing the terrain where the robot spent the four-month Martian winter.
The full-circle scene combines 817 images shot by the panoramic camera (Pancam). You can download the complete image and learn more about the expedition on NASA’s website.
This full-circle scene combines 817 images taken by the panoramic camera (Pancam) on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. It shows the terrain that surrounded the rover while it was stationary for four months of work during its most recent Martian winter.
Opportunity's Pancam took the component images between the 2,811th Martian day, or sol, of the rover's Mars surface mission (Dec. 21, 2011) and Sol 2,947 (May 8, 2012). Opportunity spent those months on a northward sloped outcrop, "Greeley Haven," which angled the rover's solar panels toward the sun low in the northern sky during southern hemisphere winter. The outcrop's informal name is a tribute to Ronald Greeley (1939-2011), who was a member of the mission team and who taught generations of planetary scientists at Arizona State University, Tempe. The site is near the northern tip of the "Cape York" segment of the western rim of Endeavour Crater.
North is at the center of the image. South is at both ends. On the far left at the horizon is "Rich Morris Hill." That outcrop on Cape York was informally named in memory of John R. "Rich" Morris (1973-2011), an aerospace engineer and musician who was a Mars rover team member and mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena.
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