What might we see at Santa Maria..?

Although the latest batch of images sent back by Oppy are mostly scientifically-interesting but agonisingly-unexciting portraits of a magnet mounted on the rover…

… it surely can’t be long now until we get our first good look at Santa Maria! Come ON, Oppy! Show us the crater! 🙂

When we do manage to peek over the local horizon, I think maybe we’ll see something a little like this…

Looking at that distorted view of Santa Maria I was struck – not for the first time – by how similar it looks to a crater visited by Oppy a long, long time ago. This is “Endurance”…

Looks very similar, doesn’t it? Quite shallow… rippled dust dunes on the floor in the centre… small capes and outcrops around the rim… a large stone, or boulder, inside the crater…

So, I’m wondering if, when we get there, Santa Maria will look something like this… (And you REALLY need to click on the image to enlarge it, or else you won’t be able to see much on it at all…)

Even if it doesn’t look quite like that, I’m pretty sure that there are quite a few features at Santa Maria that will look very similar to the features we saw at Endurance…

I’m really looking forward to seeing the dark dunes piled up against the northern wall of the crater. I am pretty sure they’ll look like the dark dunes Spirit (wake UP Spirit!!!!) saw on the rear side of Husband Hill as she descended from its summit…

They look pretty amazing in 3D too…

Check back for more pictures soon 🙂