NASA Mars Picture of the Day: 2 Years on Mars! Meridiani Planum Features Investigated by the Rover, Opportunity
Mars Global Surveyor Mars Orbiter Camera
MGS MOC Release No. MOC2-1352, 24 January 2006
MOC2-1352a: MER-B Site 50% size (1.6 MB) Full size (6.3 MB) NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems |
MOC2-1352b: Annotated View 50% size (1.6 MB) Full size (6.3 MB) NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems |
Two years ago, the Mars Exploration Rover, Opportunity, landed on Meridiani Planum. The rover marked its first Mars-year (687 Earth Days) anniversary in December 2005. Two pictures are shown here: the one on the right is the same as that on the left, except that key features have been labeled. Both pictures include a colored portion—a 3-d (stereo) anaglyph which can be viewed using “3-d” glasses with a red left eye and a blue right eye. During the landing in January 2004, rockets were fired to slow the final descent, just before the inflated airbags (containing the folded-up lander and rover) were released. The rockets disturbed the sandy surface at the location labeled “blast effects.” Following release, the airbags bounced and rolled until coming to rest inside Eagle Crater. The lander, in fact, can be seen as a bright spot near the center of Eagle Crater. Meanwhile, the jettisoned parachute and backshell landed to the southwest of Eagle, and the heatshield fell just southwest of Endurance Crater. Opportunity initially examined sedimentary rock outcrops and sandy, windblown regolith within Eagle Crater. Then it was driven by the rover team out of Eagle and on into Endurance Crater. By the end of 2004, Opportunity had left Endurance and was investigating the site where the heatshield impacted the surface. After that, the rover spent much of the year 2005 driving from the heatshield location down to the shallow Erebus Crater. Long-term plans call for driving Opportunity from Erebus to Victoria Crater, where a substantially thicker sequence of layered rock is expected to be found, relative to previous outcrops examined in the craters Endurance and Eagle. Previous MOC Views of Opportunity Rover:
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Location near: 2.0°S, 5.6°W |
300 m scale bar = 984 ft |
Illumination from: left |
Malin Space Science Systems and the California Institute of Technology
built the MOC using spare hardware from the Mars Observer mission.
MSSS operates the camera from its facilities in San Diego, California.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Mars Surveyor Operations Project
operates the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft with its industrial
partner, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, from facilities in Pasadena,
California and Denver, Colorado.
