The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured this photo of the Opportunity rover traversing the sand dunes of Meridiani Plain from its position in orbit, 172 miles away. The rover’s tracks can be seen extending away up and right in this image. (North is up.) Click the photo above to see the original cut shot. Opportunity is…
Category: Mars
Sailing a Dune Sea
Opportunity’s tracks roll away over the crests of windswept dunes in this image, combined from two photos taken on February 13, 2009 (mission day – “Sol” – 1791). The original images were greyscale. I edited them to somewhat resemble true color. (Click the image for a full-size version.) Opportunity is currently traveling across the Meridiani…
Red Planet Tours Now Departing
As a special treat for today, I’ve assembled a montage of amazing video footage from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera and put it to music by the talented Nicholas Gunn (a fitting track from his Grand Canyon album.) These videos were CG constructed using stereo image data and topographical mapping information from the MRO, recreating…
At Cliff’s Edge
Martian ground slips away into Ganges Chasm, one of many deep troughs that make up the vast Valles Marineris. Valles Marineris (Mariner Valley) is the largest known canyon in the solar system, 7 times deeper than the Grand Canyon and as long as the distance from New York to Los Angeles. It slices across…
Swinging By
Today, the spacecraft Dawn will get a little help from Mars by using its gravity to alter its course to visit Vesta and Ceres, two of the largest asteroids in the solar system. Dawn, a 2,500-pound satellite launched in September ’07, will come within 341 miles of Mars today at 4:28 PST (7:28 EST) as…
Distant Hills
Spirit sent us this image today from its position inside Gusev Crater on Mars, its cameras looking out over a rocky expanse called “Home Plate”. The original image was greyscale…I colored it in an attempt to approximate true color based on other true-color photos. It’s a little off but it’s pretty close to actual…
Rivers of Sand
Ripples and waves of sediment undulate around stone mesas in this high-resolution (false-color) photo of a crater in Mars’ Arabia Terra, a region at the boundary of highland and lowland. These eroded escarpments are thought to be the shores of an ancient ocean. Now all that laps against them are these serpentine sand dunes….
A Distant Horizon
Still one of the most compelling images taken by the Spirit exploration rover, this photo of the Sun setting behind distant mountains was taken on May 19, 2005. (In reality the “mountains” are actually the rim of a large crater.) The color here is pretty close to what a person would see were they…
Lights in the Dark 