As it finished its second Martian year on Mars, NASA's Mars Exploration
Rover Spirit was beginning to examine a group of angular rocks given
informal names corresponding to peaks in the Colorado Rockies. A Martian
year— the amount of time it takes Mars to complete one orbit around the
sun—lasts for 687 Earth days. Spirit completed its second Martian year
on the rover's 1,338th Martian day, or sol, corresponding to Oct. 8, 2007.
Two days later, on sol 1,340 (Oct. 10, 2007), Spirit used its
front hazard-identification camera to capture this wide-angle view of its
robotic arm extended to a rock informally named "Humboldt Peak." For the
rocks at this site on the southern edge of the "Home Plate" platform in
the inner basin of the Columbia Hills inside Gusev Crater, the rover team
decided to use names of Colorado peaks higher than 14,000 feet. The
Colorado Rockies team of the National League is the connection to the
baseball-theme nomenclature being used for features around Home Plate.
The tool facing Spirit on the turret at the end of the robotic arm is the
Moessbauer spectrometer.
