Tierra Adentro  << back to mosaics

Tierra Adentro

         This mosaic was acquired by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity on Sols 4785 - 4792 (July 10 - 17, 2017).  About 143 degrees wide, Tierra Adentro is an area of outcrop at the rover's location for solar conjunction. The shadow of Pancam and other parts of the rover in the bottom right of this mosaic look to be stereoscopic in appearance due to the setting sun positioned behind Opportunity during the image capture process changing the shadow length. However, at the start of conjunction, Opportunity experienced a warm reset on Sol 4795 (July 20, 2017) which stopped all sequencing and put her in a safe state called automode. Recovery action had to wait until the solar conjunction communication blackout period was over, causing all scheduled science operations during those two weeks to be lost. On Sol 4807 (August 1, 2017), one sol before the official end of conjunction, the science team sent real-time commands to the rover to restore master sequence control and nominal operations which were successful. Since half of this mosaic was scheduled to be taken over conjunction, and subsequently not taken due to the reset, the science team decided to only take one more set of images, on Sol 4811 (August 5, 2017), after conjunction before abandoning the mosaic to instead image specific targets of interest.

        NOTE: Missing data and other artifacts in this mosaic are the result of the images being acquired while the Opportunity rover was operating in "RAM mode". That is, because of issues with the rover's onboard Flash memory storage, sometimes data are stored directly in the rover's volatile RAM memory instead, and then downlinked to Earth. At the end of each sol of RAM mode operations, however, when the rover shuts down, all of that sol's data is erased. Thus, any missing images, missing color channels, or data transmission errors cannot be fixed by retransmitting the missing data the following sol, like we can do during Flash mode operations.

        Pancam's 753 nm, 535 nm, and 432 nm filters were used in making this mosaic.  Three versions are provided at full resolution: an approximate true color rendering, a false color rendering which enhances the subtle color differences in the scene, and a stereo anaglyph for 3D viewing through red-blue glasses.

        

 


Jim Bell
Pancam Instrument Lead
October 20, 2017

Full Resolution Images
True Color Thumb
  Approximate
  True Color   .jpg    .tif
  Image size: 9830 x 2858
 
False Color Thumb
  False Color    .jpg    .tif
  Image size: 9830 x 2858

 
False Color Thumb
  Stereo Anaglyph    .jpg    .tif
  Image size: 9830 x 2858

 
   Image credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell/ASU
   Image mosaicking:
     Jon Beans Proton,
     Jonathan Joseph,
     Emily Dean
   Calibration and color
   rendering: CCC
   and the Pancam team (Jim Bell)
<< back to mosaics