Hi,

Yesterday, I wanted to put in color the three very first pancam of the Sol 1.

The first shot toward the horizon :
Click to view attachment

A mosaïc of the next two pictures :
Click to view attachment

Ahhh, remember, remember

Yup - they would have been part of the 'Sol 1 postcard' that was infact succesfully taken in full by Opportunity before that first Odyssey pass, but Spirit ran out of time before the sequence timed out and the Odyssey pass started. I am always fond of images that show things in a raw 'off the press' way. If that means compression artifacts, dodgy colours, bad mosaics etc... The only mars picture I've ever actually framed is this one
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/MPF/ops/80839_full.jpg

It's horrid - but I love it

Doug

I saw that live too

Very nice pics. And this also shows that the end of the rover mission will not be so disastrous for UMSF - there's so much to go back to like this.

Phil

And somehow some long-dormant neurons in my head fired, and the word "Yogi" came to mind... but I'm not sure which rock is which anymore.

yogi isn't actually in that picture.

Yup - a few frames to the right for Yogi.

AND - that was pre reretract of the airbags.

Doug

Gotta love the picture..unfortunately I was in the middle of a 7 day hike in norhtern ontario so I missed all the excitement of the landing and first pics.

... and a few weeks for a pic from MRO

Doug,

I was always a fan of space exploration but it was that image of the "Twin Peaks" that sealed my fate as a Mars fanatic. I actually called out sick from work a couple of times to watch the NASA press briefings on TV. I dreamed of what view the pathfinder rover would see if it could reach that hilltop.

Spirit climbing Husband Hill was a dream come true for me, I never even dared believe it possible until they reached the top of West Spur.

Thanks for this forum,

Kung

Nice nostalgia, Ant.

I remember being excited at the possibility of Spirit actually roving so far that it couldn't see the landing platform anymore...little did we know...

Same for myself.

The Pathfinder mission (as I assume is the same for a myriad of others here) really whet my appitite for what we encountered at Gussev. The first images from Spirit were so familiar -- the rocks, the crater, THE HILLS. My three favorite images from Pathifinder were (1) Twin Peaks, (2) Sojourner off the lander, and (3) the lander from Sojourner's little cameras. So, with Spirit I was immediatly nostalogic. I dreamed of ( A ) seeing the lander behind the rover ( B )to rove far enough that the lander was not visible any longer (an unfulfilled Pathfinder dream), and ( C ) the impossible dream of looking out from the peaks of those beautifull hills (my second unfullfilled Pathfinder dream, and a crazy one at that).

Little did I / we know then.


-- Pertinax

Hard to believe the image can look so horrible considering how cool it was back then!

Still MPF was great, the first lander mission for the most of us...

Less romantic but it does show how good and inspiring it is to see the REAL images on Mars once you've seen this one :
Click to view attachment

I am slowly working on assembling the top three or four tiers of the superpan, using a stack of all the other images I can find to fill in the gaps. With my 14.4 modem and small monitor, it was quite an overwhemling....kind of funny now. But there is some really good material in the dataset. I am also working on assembling the Sojourner color views.

overgremlin ?
Good luck anyway, I'm looking for it (I mean the superpan, not the overwh..atever)

May not be able to see the lander from Spirit's current position but I did manage to find the ridge Spirit is parked on in images taken while she was still on the lander.
Click to view attachment

...now that's something to put this topic in perspective, Alan...thank you very much!

Anyone else find it amazing how much variety we found in Gusev despite the "short" (but much longer than dreamed of) traverse of Spirit? Sure makes me wonder what we'll know of Mars in a thousand years or so after we've physically been to every major place...

Thanks, alan. That's a nice perspective.

Hmm. Kind of hate to say it, but would it be worthwhile for Spirit to wend its way at least partially back to the lander?

Rationale: The lander has been stationary & quiescent for more than two years. The amount of dust deposition to date would not only provide some clues about the rate at which this process occurs, but also provide some core data that might be needed for MRO to positively detect VL1, VL2, Beagle, Pathfinder, Mars 3, et. al....

I wonder if MRO will be able to see Sojourners tracks. Granted, they would just be a faint line, but they would be neat to see.

Well... remember, Sojourner was programmed to circle the lander platform in the event of comm loss. It's possible (if not likely) that the Little Toaster might have operated for quite a while after the lander's batteries died, in which case she might have drawn a rather obvious circle around the lander.

Of course, it will be next to impossible to tell from such a feature (if it *is* visible) exactly how long Sojourner orbited her poor, dead parent... And from what I understand from earlier discussions, it's literally impossible for any of the the current orbiters to even try to contact Sojourner on her UHF link, on the extreme off chance that she's still working after all these years.

-the other Doug

Hmm - a Sojourner track to HiRISE might look like an MER track to MOC perhaps - BUT - if I'm honest, I think time will have taken their toll on them and removed most, if not all evidence of the tracks.

Doug

Well HiRISE has the resolution and we know it has amazing signal to noise, but I fear that dust deposition over that last decade will have rendered the tracks with nearly zero contrast over the surrounding ground so that even HiRISE can't see them. But we'll see...

I'm just hoping we can see the little rover - or even just see that it is not where we left it. It would be VERY cool to know that Sojourner set off exploring on her own after we lost contact.

James

If Sojourner didn't go far looking for "mama", she'll be an obviously rock-in-the-wrong-place when compared with maps of the lander's vicinity, though that will take real work to figure out. At modest distance from the lander, the rock-maps won't be good enough to tell and they'll have to spot the unresolved dusty pixel's color contrast, mostly, to tell it from a rock.

Sojourner would have started an attempted circumnaviation of the lander at a radius of about 5m after a set number of sols of no communications. Now - that 5m radius would include all of the rock garden which I would have conisdered not far from impassable for a little rover without human intervention. (even with human intervention they got sort of stuck in it for a while)

http://www.solarviews.com/raw/path/path013.jpg

I think Sojourner will be identifiable.

Doug

It was beyond the rock garden at the end of the mission, roughly 10 meters out. So it may have made it some distance before getting stuck.

Yup - pure speculation but it might have navigated back down toward Yogi, then around the lander to the right, ending up SSW of the Lander at the start of the Rock Garden...

OR...

It died not long after the lander and is sat where we last saw it

Doug