Northwest Twilight

        This mosaic was acquired by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity on Sols 4917 and 4920 (November 22 & 25, 2017). Taken during twilight, this mosaic covers the near field northwestern trough. The lens flare in the far left frame 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 filter was used in this mosaic. Two versions are provided at full resolution: an overhead perspective projection of a mosaic made from the left eye only, and an overhead perspective projection of a stereo anaglyph for 3D viewing through red-blue glasses.

Jim Bell
Pancam Instrument Lead
February 28, 2018