Click on the image for 'Lookout Panorama' from Spirit (QTVR)

Click on the image for 'Lookout Panorama' from Spirit animation

This is the Spirit panoramic camera's "Lookout" panorama, acquired on the rover's 410th to 413th martian days, or sols (Feb. 27 to Mar. 2, 2005). The view is from a position known informally as "Larry's Lookout" along the drive up "Husband Hill." The summit of Husband Hill is the far peak near the center of this panorama and is about 200 meters (656 feet) away from the rover and about 45 meters (148 feet) higher in elevation. The bright rocky outcrop near the center of the panorama is part of the "Cumberland Ridge," and beyond that and to the left is the "Tennessee Valley."

The panorama spans 360 degrees and consists of images obtained in 108 individual pointings and five filters at each pointing. This mosaic is an approximately true-color rendering generated using the images acquired through panoramic camera's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer, and 480-nanometer filters. The lighting varied considerably during the four sols that it took to acquire this image (partly because of imaging at different times of sol, but also partly because of small sol-to-sol variations in the dustiness of the atmosphere), resulting in some obvious image seams or rock shadow variations within the mosaic. These seams have been smoothed out from the sky parts of the mosaic in order to simulate better the vista that a person would have if they were viewing it all at the same time on Mars. However, it is often not possible or practical to smooth out such seams for regions of rock, soil, rover tracks, or solar panels. Such is the nature of acquiring and assembling large Pancam panoramas from the rovers.

Spirit's tracks leading back from the "West Spur" region can be seen on the right side of the panorama. The region just beyond the area where the tracks made their last zig-zag is the area known as "Paso Robles," where Spirit discovered rock and soil deposits with very high sulfur abundances. After acquiring this mosaic (which took several weeks to fully downlink and then several more weeks to process), Spirit drove around the Cumberland Ridge rocks seen here and is now driving up the flank of Husband Hill, heading toward the summit.