14 April 2008
Cape Verde Mosaic
Posted by Ryan Anderson
Last week I posted a nice mosaic that Opportunity took of her current target, Cape Verde. Ever since the dust storm last summer, the camera lenses have been a bit clouded up, and it takes some time to fix the images up so that they look a little more normal. A new, touched-up false color version of the image is now available, as well as an approximate true color mosaic. Opportunity has been carefully extracting herself from a difficult little sand trap on the slope of Duck Bay in Victoria crater, but should be free and driving again sometime this week. In the meantime, while we wait for new mosaics to come down, we can still enjoy this view (click for full-res; top is true color, bottom is false color):
Nice 🙂
The top one looks more like what one would expect Mars to look like. Why did they make a false colour one?
The false color views are useful because they exaggerate color variations. This lets us find rocks that look “unusual” so that we can investigate them further. It also just generally makes subtle changes in composition, sand grain size, or amount of dust more obvious, which can be useful for planning where to drive.