The Twin Peaks, humble hills southwest of the Mars Pathfinder landing site. Photo credit: NASA / JPL
NASA‘s Mars The Pathfinder mission landed on the Red Planet on July 4, 1997. The tiny rover, named after the abolitionist Sojourner Truth Sojourner, spent 83 days on a scheduled seven-day mission exploring Martian terrain, taking pictures, and taking chemical, atmospheric and other measurements. As the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft neared its destination, no NASA mission had successfully reached Mars in more than 20 years. The final data transfer from Pathfinder was on September 27, 1997 at 10:23 UTC.
This picture shows the Twin Peaks, humble hills southwest of the Mars Pathfinder landing site. They were discovered on the first panoramas captured by the IMP camera on July 4th and subsequently identified in Viking Orbiter images captured more than 20 years ago. The peaks are about 30-35 meters high. North Twin is approximately 860 meters from the lander and South Twin is approximately one kilometer away. The scene includes ridges of rock and swallows, or “mounds” of flood debris, stretching from tens of meters from the lander to the distance of South Twin Peak.
The composite color frames that make up this right eye image are made up of seven frames captured with various color filters that have been enlarged 500 percent and then stitched together using Adobe Photoshop to create what is practically a high resolution panchromatic frame is sharper than a single frame would be. This panchromatic frame was then colored with the red, green and blue filtered images from the same sequence. The color balance has been adjusted to approximate the true color of Mars.
