Panorama: NASA’s Mars Pancam

This image released by NASA shows a full-circle scene combining 817 images taken by the panoramic camera (Pancam) on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. It shows the terrain that surrounded the rover while it was stationary for four months during its most recent Martian winter. Opportunity took the component images between the 2,811th Martian day, or sol, of the rover's Mars surface mission (Dec. 21, 2011) and Sol 2,947 (May 8, 2012). Opportunity spent those months on a northward sloped outcrop, Greeley Haven, which angled the rover's solar panels toward the sun low in the northern sky during southern hemisphere winter. The outcrop's informal name is a tribute to Ronald Greeley (1939-2011), who was a member of the mission team and taught generations of planetary scientists at Arizona State University. The site is near the northern tip of the Cape York segment of the western rim of Endeavour Crater.