Orbital View of Spirit at 'Troy'

In this view from Martian orbit, the pale circular shape in the center is a low plateau called "Home Plate," about 80 meters (about 260 feet) across. The bright dot just to the left of Home Plate at the 9 o'clock position is NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. North is toward the top.

The view is a portion of an image taken on June 13, 2009, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. At that date, Spirit had been embedded for more than a month in a patch of soft soil called "Troy." During the subsequent three months, Spirit studied the unusually layered soil at the site while engineers used test rovers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to assess possible maneuvers for getting Spirit away from Troy.

The site is at 14.6 degrees south latitude, 175.5 degrees east longitude. Home Plate is in the inner basin of the Columbia Hills range, inside Mars' Gusev Crater. Spirit has been exploring the Columbia Hills and nearby features since January 2004 in a mission originally scheduled to last for three months.

Full-frame images from this HiRISE observation, catalogued as ESP_013499_1650, are at http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ESP_013499_1650. The image was taken at 2:39 p.m. local Mars time, with the sun about 51 degrees above the horizon. The season was summer in the southern hemisphere of Mars.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Mars Exploration Rovers for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, is the prime contractor for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter project and built the orbiter. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment is operated by the University of Arizona, Tucson, and the instrument was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo.