Coming Into Focus
Aug. 9th, 2012 07:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhen the Mars Science Laboratory landed and sent back its very first pictures, my immediate reaction to them was that there weren't any big rocks in sight; it looked like the rover had been set down on a flat, gravelly plain. I supposed the larger features of the crater it had been targeted for were all somewhere over the horizon. Even as I said that, though, I was looking for the follow-up pictures and starting to get a sense there were hills on the horizon...
The main cameras are starting to return pictures now (and I suppose I'm glad they're working all right; I might have been waiting for that bit of good news before I said anything else), and the hills are there off in the distance. It's good to see further information correcting and refining initial impressions; I'm thinking a bit of when the first pictures from Mars Pathfinder appeared on the evening news, the first new pictures of Mars from the surface in twenty years, and in a difference from the Viking pictures there were hills on the horizon... This time, it seems, the rover's going to go all the way there.
The main cameras are starting to return pictures now (and I suppose I'm glad they're working all right; I might have been waiting for that bit of good news before I said anything else), and the hills are there off in the distance. It's good to see further information correcting and refining initial impressions; I'm thinking a bit of when the first pictures from Mars Pathfinder appeared on the evening news, the first new pictures of Mars from the surface in twenty years, and in a difference from the Viking pictures there were hills on the horizon... This time, it seems, the rover's going to go all the way there.