Opportunity panorama of Santa Maria Crater rim. © Stuart Atkinson. As Opportunity wraps up her stay at Santa Maria crater, Stuart Atkinson leaves us with this wonderful “Ansel Adams style” panorama of the crater’s rim and dune-carpeted interior. “I’m very, very jealous of the people who will one day make a pilgrimage to this…
Tag: Mars
An Opportunity From Above
The eye in the sky sees all…especially when that eye is the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter! Here’s another great image – this time in color! – of the crater known as Santa Maria, taken from over 150 miles above the Martian surface by the MRO…and if you look carefully at the lower…
Desert Planet
Can’t see the video below? Click here. Here’s the most recent HiClip – a collection of images from the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, assembled and set to music by the HiRISE imaging team at the University of Arizona. These recent images show some fascinating desert-type terrain across Mars, resembling Earth deserts except…
Beautiful Barchans
Barchan sand dunes in Mars’ Arkhangelsky Crater This image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera features a barchan dune within the floor of Arkhangelsky Crater on Mars, one of its forward-facing “horns” displaying a sharp, serpentine ridge. The dunes in Arkhangelsky Crater are made of darker-colored material than the surrounding landscape, although the image…
Turning Fear Around
Here’s a quick animation of Mars’ moon Phobos, made from five images – released today – taken by ESA’s Mars Express during its flyby on January 9, 2011. Passing by the 14-mile-wide moon at a distance of about 62 miles (100 km), Mars Express took images in five HRSC channels…I combined those to create this….
Roving the Edge
Here’s a great view of Santa Maria crater made from a couple of raw images from the Opportunity rover, taken earlier this month and assembled by Stu Atkinson. (I did take the liberty of cropping the original image a bit and filling in some of the sky at upper right.) I particularly like the texture…
Photo Trivia
In the tradition of Universe Today’s “Where in the Universe” series, here’s a little space exploration-based photo trivia for you: what is pictured in the above image? It’s something that many of you are already familiar with, and it’s not outside of our solar system…..but that’s all the clues I’m giving! 🙂 I know one…
At Crater’s Edge
Here’s a fantastic look at an inner wall of Santa Maria crater on Mars, the latest stop for the rover Opportunity on its travels across the Meridiani plain. Colorized by Stuart Atkinson for his Opportunity-dedicated blog The Road to Endeavour, this is a section of a larger panoramic image showing the crater’s rim and jumbled…
On the Edge of Santa Maria
Opportunity has finally made it to the edge of her latest observation target: the crater named “Santa Maria”!
Following a Moon Shadow
Can’t see the video below? Click here. Here’s an intriguing video assembled by Daniel Macháček, made from archived image data from NASA’s Viking 1 orbiter; on September 28, 1977, over a year after dropping a probe onto the Martian surface, the orbiter captured images of the shadow of Mars’ moon Phobos passing over the billowy top…
Ditches, Devils and Dunes
There’s a lot going on in this image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera…swirling dust devil tracks paint dark streaks over the sand dunes within Russell Crater (click here for a larger view of the region) while long “peculiar” ditches run snakelike down the crater’s sloped walls. Click the image above for a…
The Valley So High
This beautiful landscape scene may be reminiscent of sandy deserts on Earth but it’s actually a valley slicing into the frozen ice of Mars’ north pole as seen by NASA’s Mars Odyssey, soon to become the longest-operating spacecraft on or around the red planet. The image above was created from several images taken by Odyssey’s…
Lights in the Dark 