24 January 2006
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. Figures 2 and 3 are MOC narrow
angle non-stereo images.
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.
Location near: 2.0°S, 5.6°W
Image width: 300 m scale bar = 984 ft
Illumination from: left
