Columbia Hills Flyover 2.0; Awesome Meridiani Mosaics

By Nancy Atkinson - September 23, 2009 at 3:44 PM UTC | uncategorized
2009_drive_half.jpg

About 18 months ago Doug Ellison from

UnmannedSpaceflight.com

created a flyover of the

Columbia

Hills on Mars using data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Spirit, the Mars rover. He's now done a 2.0 version to mark Spirit's recent birthday -- she's been on Mars for 3 Martian years. Ellison made the skies a little hazier to mark the moderate dust storm that occurred recently and put Spirit in her current predicament, stuck in the sandy soil near Home Plate. Additionally, he added music and an intro credit page to avoid it being badly credited, (which happened when it was posted on Astronomy Picture of the Day in May of 2008) as well as a map at the end to show where Spirit has been all this time. If you saw the first version, this one is even better. If you haven't seen it before, prepare to be amazed.

Not to leave out Opportunity, below you'll find some incredible drive mosaics put together by

James Canvin

, also from

UnmannedSpaceflight.com

. Oppy is putting the pedal to the metal to reach Endeavour Crater and is covering a lot of territory these days.

[/caption] This looks like a very interesting location, with rocks and scarps and all sorts of interesting stuff littering the dunes. James told me this mosaic was created with three different images and colorized by using R21 filters (red & blue then with artifical green made by mixing the two). [caption id="attachment_41188" align="aligncenter" width="580" caption="Opportunity drive mosiac from sol 2011. Compiled by James Canvin. Used by permission."]

[/caption]

Canvin told me that the crater near the center-left, off in the distance, is Nautilus. The rocks in the near-field are the surroundings to Nereus crater to which is Oppy was right next to and is out of frame to the left. The rover has already driven in the direction of the center of the image (this is a 'drive direction' mosaic after all!), and a much larger mosaic of this is still being downlinked from the rover, which should be even more spectacular.

Sources:

Doug Ellison,

Martian Vistas

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com