Mars scientists may not
have ordered a cleaning service for NASA’s Spirit rover, but they welcomed the favor
all the same.
Taken 10 days apart, these
two images show that dust was removed from the calibration target used by
Spirit’s panoramic camera. Spirit took the picture on the left on the rover's
416th Martian day, or sol, (March 5, 2005) and took the picture on the right on
sol 426 (March 15, 2005). Other evidence of dust-lifting winds were a jump in power
output by Spirit's solar arrays on sol 420 from removal of some accumulated
dust, and sighting of two dust devils in sol 421 images from Spirit. The size
of the base plate on the calibration target shown in both of these images is 3.5
inches (8 centimeters) per each side.
These are
the panoramic camera team's best current attempt at generating "true
color" views of what these scenes would look like if viewed by a human on
Mars. They were generated from mathematical combinations of six calibrated, left-eye
Pancam images for each sequence, using filters ranging from 430-nanometer to
750-nanometer wavelengths.
Credit: NASA/JPL
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