Orbital View of Opportunity's Region

This view of an area about 140 kilometers (about 90 miles) wide in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars shows the region around NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. Opportunity, in the seventh year of its exploration of Mars, is in the upper central portion of the image, on multi-year trek from Victoria crater toward the much larger Endeavour crater. In April 2010, Opportunity captured views of the rims of Endeavour crater and the more distant Iazu crater on the horizon to southeast from the rover. (See PIA13081 and PIA13080.) The rover's position relative to those craters is indicated here.

This view is a mosaic of daytime infrared images taken by the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter. The THEMIS mosaic was prepared using JMARS (http://jmars.asu.edu), a software tool developed at Arizona State University for viewing and analyzing Mars data sets.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) was developed by Arizona State University, Tempe, in collaboration with Raytheon Santa Barbara Remote Sensing. The THEMIS investigation is led by Dr. Philip Christensen at Arizona State University. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, is the prime contractor for the Odyssey project, and developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.