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PIA06852: Pebble Puzzle Solved
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity took this approximate true-color image on Aug. 16, 2004 to determine if a stuck pebble had jammed its rock abrasion tool.
 Target Name:  Mars
 Is a satellite of:  Sol (our sun)
 Mission:  Mars Exploration Rover (MER) 
 Spacecraft:  Opportunity
 Instrument:  Panoramic Camera 
 Product Size:  296 x 296 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  Cornell University 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA06852.tif (263.3 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA06852.jpg (13.67 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:

figure 1 for PIA06852
Figure 1

In the quest to determine if a pebble was jamming the rock abrasion tool on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, scientists and engineers examined this up-close, approximate true-color image of the tool. The picture was taken by the rover's panoramic camera, using filters centered at 601, 535, and 482 nanometers, at 12:47 local solar time on sol 200 (August 16, 2004).

Colored spots have been drawn on this image corresponding to regions where panoramic camera reflectance spectra were acquired (see chart in Figure 1). Those regions are: the grinding wheel heads (yellow); the rock abrasion tool magnets (green); the supposed pebble (red); a sunlit portion of the aluminum rock abrasion tool housing (purple); and a shadowed portion of the rock abrasion tool housing (brown). These spectra demonstrated that the composition of the supposed pebble was clearly different from that of the sunlit and shadowed portions of the rock abrasion tool, while similar to that of the dust-coated rock abrasion tool magnets and grinding heads. This led the team to conclude that the object disabling the rock abrasion tool was indeed a martian pebble.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Cornell/USGS

Image Addition Date:
2004-09-04