"Everest Panorama"

     This is the Spirit Pancam "Everest" panorama, acquired on sols 620 to 622 (October 1 to 3, 2005) from a position in the Columbia Hills at the true summit of Husband Hill. The summit region is a broad plateau about 100 meters (300 feet) above the surrounding plains of Gusev crater, consisting mostly of outcrop rocks and windblown drifts. The distant view in the center of this mosaic is looking from the summit into the South Basin, the region where Spirit will be driving down into and exploring over the coming months.

      The panorama spans 360 degrees and consists of images obtained in 81 individual pointings and 4 Pancam filters at each pointing. This mosaic is an approximate true color rendering generated using the images acquired through Pancam's 750, 530, and 430 nm filters. There were large changes in the brightness and color of the martian sky during the 3 sols that it took to acquire this mosaic. In some of the images near the horizon, the view is clear enough to see extremely faint features as far away as the rim of Gusev crater (80 km or 50 miles away), while in some other horizon images it was too hazy to see those distant features. Because of these strong variations, there was no attempt made to "smooth" the sky in this mosaic to simulate the kind of view one would get by taking in the landscape all at once. Such a process would have lead to the faint distant features being washed out, so they have been preserved, perhaps at the cost of a slightly less pretty overall view. Still, though, the view is stunning from the top.

      Amazingly, several large dust devils can also be seen in this image, just right of center and partially silhouetted against the horizon. These little storms moved between the time the images were taken through Pancam's red, green, and blue filters, and so they appear to look like red, green, and blue dust devils. In reality, their colors are actually much closer to the reddish-brown color of the soils of Mars.

Jim Bell
Pancam PEL
31 October 2005 (updated 26 January 2006)

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell
Image mosaicking: JPL/MIPL (Bob Deen)
Calibration and color rendering: Cornell Calibration Crew and the Pancam team (Jim Bell)
Full Size JPG | Full Size TIFF
Image Dimensions: 22,348x2697

Everest (Stereo Anaglyph)

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit used its panoramic camera (Pancam) to record a 360-degree vista, dubbed the "Everest" panorama, from the top of "Husband Hill" in early October 2005. This view is a stereo anaglyph of the Everest panorama, showing it in three dimensions to viewers using red-blue stereo glasses (red lens on the left).

The images combined into this anaglyph were taken through the Pancam's blue L7 and R1 filters during Spirit's 620th through 622nd Martian days (Oct. 1 through Oct. 3, 2005). Geometric and brightness adjustments have been applied. The view is presented in a cylindrical-perspective projection with rover tilt removed.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell
Image mosaicking: JPL/MIPL (Bob Deen)
Full Size JPG (stereo) | Full Size TIFF (stereo)
Image Dimensions: 26,244x3500

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