Check out this outstanding photo of NASA’s intrepid Opportunity rover. The Agency’s HiRISE camera caught a rare glimpse of the spacecraft on Valentine’s day while orbiting high above the “Murray Ridge” section of the western rim of Mars’ Endeavour Crater. Can you spot it?
Here, have some arrows:
Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona; Caption Credit: NASA | The red arrow points to Opportunity at the center of the image. Blue arrows point to tracks left by the rover since it entered the area seen here, in October 2013. The scene covers a patch of ground about one-quarter mile (about 400 meters) wide. North is toward the top.
The rover doesn’t feature very prominently in the photo – but then, this photo was taken from space, so just sit and mull that over for a bit. NASA’s HiRISE – the most powerful camera we’ve ever sent to another planet – doesn’t capture photos of planetside rovers very often, and even when it does they can be hard to spot. When I spoke with HiRISE Principle Investigator Alfred McEwen back in January, 2012, the camera had been used to capture a photo of a spacecraft on its descent to the Red Planet’s surface (a feat it repeated in 2012 during Curiosity’s landing), but, if I recall correctly, nobody on the HiRISE team had yet managed spy a rover in any of the almost 22,000 photos captured by the camera up to that point.
https://gizmodo.com/this-is-hirise-the-most-powerful-camera-weve-ever-sent-5875075
https://gizmodo.com/a-photograph-of-curiosity-during-landing-has-been-leake-5932151
The team has captured a few photos of the planet’s robotic visitors since then, however, including this one of Opportunity on July 8, 2013, and these stunning shots of Curiosity’s space litter.
https://gizmodo.com/see-all-the-landing-hardware-that-curiosity-scattered-o-5932592
https://gizmodo.com/this-is-all-the-beautiful-space-litter-left-on-mars-by-5966206
Point being: small though Opportunity may appear in the photo, this really is a rare and beautiful reminder of all that we’ve accomplished in our endeavors in space. A photo of a robot on Mars, captured by another robot orbiting Mars. If you don’t think that’s amazing, I really don’t know what to tell you.
