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PIA05189: Magic Carpet Shows Its Colors
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit shows the 'Magic Carpet' region near the rover at Gusev Crater, Mars. Each color on the spectra matches a line on the graph assessing the varying mineral compositions of martian rocks and soils.
 Target Name:  Mars
 Is a satellite of:  Sol (our sun)
 Mission:  Mars Exploration Rover (MER) 
 Spacecraft:  Spirit
 Instrument:  Panoramic Camera 
 Product Size:  1063 x 796 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  Cornell University 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA05189.tif (921.7 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA05189.jpg (93.45 kB)  

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:
The upper left image in this display is from the panoramic camera on the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, showing the "Magic Carpet" region near the rover at Gusev Crater, Mars, on Sol 7, the seventh martian day of its journey (Jan. 10, 2004). The lower image, also from the panoramic camera, is a monochrome (single filter) image of a rock in the "Magic Carpet" area. Note that colored portions of the rock correlate with extracted spectra shown in the plot to the side. Four different types of materials are shown: the rock itself, the soil in front of the rock, some brighter soil on top of the rock, and some dust that has collected in small recesses on the rock face ("spots"). Each color on the spectra matches a line on the graph, showing how the panoramic camera's different colored filters are used to broadly assess the varying mineral compositions of martian rocks and soils.
Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Cornell

Image Addition Date:
2004-02-02