NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity climbed out of "Victoria Crater"
following the tracks it had made when it descended into the
800-meter-diameter (half-mile-diameter) bowl nearly a year earlier.
The rover's navigation camera captured this view back into the crater just
after finishing a 6.8-meter (22-foot) drive that brought Opportunity out
onto level ground during the mission's 1,634th Martian day, or sol (Aug.
28, 2008).
The rover laid down the first tracks at this entry and exit point during
its 1,291st sol (Sept. 11, 2007), after about a year of exploring around
the outside of Victoria Crater for the best access route to the interior.
On that sol, Opportunity drove a short distance into the crater and then
backed out to check that the footing was good enough to trust this point
as an exit route when the work in the crater was finished. Two sols later,
Opportunity drove in again for its extended investigation of the rock
layers exposed inside the crater.
While inside, the rover spent several months using the contact instruments
on its robotic arm to analyze the composition of the rock layers it could
drive across on the surface of the upper slope. Then Opportunity drove
close to the base of the "Cape Verde" promontory that forms part of the
crater rim and appears in the upper center of this image. From that
perspective, the rover used its panoramic camera to examine details of
layering in the 6-meter-tall (20-foot-tall) cliff.
For scale, the distance between the parallel tracks left by the rover's
wheels is about 1 meter (39 inches) from the middle of one track to the
middle of the other. After getting past the top of the inner slope of the
crater, the Sol 1634 drive also got through a sand ripple where the tracks
appear deepest.
