"Independence Pan"


       This is the Spirit Pancam "Independence" panorama, acquired on sols 536 to 543 (July 6 to 13, 2005) from a position in the Columbia Hills near the summit of Husband Hill. The summit of Husband Hill is the peak near the right of this panorama and is about 100 meters away from the rover and about 30 meters higher in elevation. The rocky outcrops downhill and on the left side of this mosaic are the Larry's Lookout and Cumberland Ridge rocks that Spirit explored in April, May, and June 2005.

      The panorama spans 360 degrees and consists of images obtained in 108 individual pointings and 5 Pancam filters at each pointing. This mosaic is an approximate true color rendering generated using the images acquired through Pancam's 750, 530, and 480 nm filters. The lighting varied considerably during the 8 sols that it took to acquire this image (partly because of imaging at different times of sol, but also partly because of small sol-to-sol variations in the dustiness of the atmosphere), resulting in some obvious image seams or rock shadow variations within the mosaic. These seams have been smoothed out from the sky parts of the mosaic in order to simulate better the vista that a person would have if they were viewing it all at the same time on Mars. However, it is often not possible or practical to smooth out such seams for regions of rock, soil, rover tracks, or solar panels. Such is the nature of acquiring and assembling large Pancam panoramas from the rovers.

Jim Bell
Pancam PEL
26 August 2005

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: 22348x4563


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