NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity rover spent about 300 sols
(Martian days) during 2006 and 2007 traversing the rim of Victoria Crater.
Besides looking for a good place to enter the crater, the rover obtained
images of rock outcrops exposed at several cliffs along the way.
The cliff in this image from Opportunity's panoramic camera (Pancam) is
informally named Cape St. Vincent. It is a promontory approximately 12
meters (39 feet) tall on the northern rim of Victoria crater, near the
farthest point along the rover's traverse around the rim. Layers seen in
Cape St. Vincent have proven to be among the best examples of meter scale
cross-bedding observed on Mars to date. Cross-bedding is a geologic term
for rock layers which are inclined relative to the horizontal and which
are indicative of ancient sand dune deposits. In order to get a better
look at these outcrops, Pancam "super-resolution" imaging techniques were
utilized. Super-resolution is a type of imaging mode which acquires many
pictures of the same target to reconstruct a digital image at a higher
resolution than is native to the camera. These super-resolution images
have allowed scientists to discern that the rocks at Victoria Crater once
represented a large dune field, not unlike the Sahara desert on Earth, and
that this dune field migrated with an ancient wind flowing from the north
to the south across the region. Other rover chemical and mineral
measurements have shown that many of the ancient sand dunes studied in
Meridiani Planum were modified by surface and subsurface liquid water long
ago.
This is a Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity Panoramic Camera image
acquired on sol 1167 (May 7, 2007), and was constructed from a
mathematical combination of 16 different blue filter (480 nm) images.