A new view of Cape York

Those wonderful, wonderful people in charge of the HiRISE camera onboard NASA’s MRO probe have taken another high resolution image of Cape York, Oppy’s predicted “landfall” site once she has crossed the Meridiani plain and reached the rim of Endeavour Crater. You can find the image here:

http://www.uahirise.org/ESP_021892_1775

There are various links on the site to different versions of the image, but the best use of it is to view it in a “zoomable” fashion using the IAS Viewer. You need to download some software to do that, but there’s a full guide on the site.

If you use the IAS Viewer you can zoom in on the image and see views like this…

What I like to do is pan around the image at a high magnification, Save the views I see, then stitch them altogether to make a single high resolution view. When I do that, I get something like this…

That’s something, isn’t it? You should see it in colour…!

…and here it is…

Ok, so I’ve ‘tweaked’ that a little, but I like to try and offer something a little different here, as you know. 🙂

So, when you click on those images you can go on a virtual tour of Cape York. You will see ledges and outcrops at the summit, cracks and ridges around the edges, and a lot more besides. But how big are all those features compared to Oppy? It’s hard to get a sense of scale, isn’t it?

Let’s take those images and drop some ‘virtual’ Oppys onto them, showing our brave rover gal at the same scale as Cape York. You’ll need to click on the images to find Oppy at the end of dark lines marking imaginary paths she might take up onto and then across Cape York. ( And do I have to stress again that this is just for fun, and that I’m not claiming any great degree of scientific accuracy here? Good, I didn’t think so…! )

So, there you are, a new view of Cape York, with added Oppys for good measure! But how is Oppy actually doing, and how confident are her team of making it across Meridiani and to the rim of Endeavour crater? Read the next blog post to find out… 🙂