1/7/2004: More Mars

[Undertoad]

This is the first non-stereo color pic from Spirit, I think, and it's also today's Astronomy Pic of the Day. But while APoD crops a neat landscpe view out of this, I took the whole big image and reduced it, so you could see what the big image looks like. You are in what they think might be an ancient lake bed, looking at Martian horizon.



Then I cropped out just a section of the lower right, and sharpened it. Here you can see a sharper shot of a big ol Martian rock. The messy area is where the Spirit airbag was, before it retracted. And interestingly, it looks like the Spirit landing pressed some of those rocks right into the dust.

Especially on the wider image, you can see a trail of darker dust on the left side of any large rock. They figure this is wind sweeping the dust.

Now that the rover has landed, positioned its antenna, and had a look around, its next step will be to stand up, calibrate its instruments, pick a good direction, and start moving. It could get even more interesting from here.