Northwest Trough

This mosaic was acquired by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity from Sols 4909-4921 (November 14-27, 2017). A channel, or trough, to the northwest of Opportunity's location in Perseverance Valley is shown here in this roughly 133 degree wide field of view. The southern trough is separated from the northwestern trough by a mesa-like feature that acts like a "fork in the road" between the two troughs. The full scene of both troughs is visible in the albedo panorama from Sol 4924 where the mesa-like feature is far left frame of the panorama with the northwest trough to the left wrapping around to the other side of the panorama and the southern trough on right of the mesa-like feature. The bad lens flare in some of the upper left frames of this mosaic are due to sunlight being scattered into the camera by dust on the front window of the camera.

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
February 28, 2018