Coming Into Focus

When 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.