New Color Image Shows Opportunity Rover from Orbit

By Nancy Atkinson - March 9, 2011 at 10:28 AM UTC | Planetary Science
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Another great shot by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: this one of the Opportunity rover sitting on the edge of Santa Maria Crater. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment took this image on March 1, 2011, and also visible are the tracks in the Martian soil that Oppy created as she made her way to the crater.

"Opportunity has been studying this relatively fresh 90-meter diameter crater to better understand how crater excavation occurred during the impact and how it has been modified by weathering and erosion since," said Matt Golombeck, a research geologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and part of the rover team. "Note the surrounding bright blocks and rays of ejecta."

You can see a non-annotated image

here.

March 1 on Earth is the 2,524th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity's work on Mars.

By the way, MRO celebrates its 5th anniversary of being in orbit of Mars on March 10. Wow, 5 years already? But its been 5 years of great images and discoveries, with wishes from all of us for many more!

Ken Kremer has put together a couple of collection of images that Opportunity has taken while at Santa Maria, some that he and others from Unmanned Spaceflight.com have processed and enhanced for sharper, colored views --

this article contains several awesome panoramas

, and

here's a collection of 3-D images

.

Source:

HiRISE website

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