The North Rim

The north rim of Gale Crater lines the northern horizon of Curiosity’s locale, but is not seen in most of the Mastcam and Navcam views, which tend to be towards Mt. Sharp in the south. Here is a comparison of panoramic views that do show it. The B&W panorama actually covers 360 degrees, and is composed of 12 images in the Right Navcam Sol 60 Raw image gallery. At this time Curiosity was at the Rocknest site.

On Sol 25 Curiosity was near the landing site, and took the twelve Mastcam images that form what I call the “botched panorama” because they do not actually overlap. This means that panorama software can do nothing with them, because it depends on matching overlapping areas. However, one can align them by eye to form continuous contours, and the result shows a consistent gap, seemingly caused by a misalignment of some kind, because the black edges are part of the original raw images.

Here, the assembled panorama has been reduced in scale and superimposed on the Navcam panorama. It is still at a somewhat larger scale as shown by the pink lines which match it to the Navcam horizon.

Note the change in the midground between the two locations. Curiosity had come over the rise seen to the left of the Navcam view ( note tracks at left, ) and it now starts to obscure the north rim. The sol 3 panorama does extend to this point, as shown by the reduced scale excerpt of its “tail”

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