Cumbrian Sky

Apollo - History Made, and Lost...

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:14:18 GMT

WELCOME TO "CARNIVAL OF SPACE" READERS..!

Today - for Europeans anyway (time difference, and all that) - is the 39th anniversary of Neil Armstrong first stepping on to the Moon. 39 years... a year short of four decades... and we're still at least a dozen years away from going back. Unbelievable, isn't it?

No... I'm not going to get all melancholy here about lost destinies, thrown-away opportunities, political shortsightedness and the whole "tragedy of the Lost Moon" thing... my views on that are well known already, and my groaning and grumbling on won't change a thing... what's striking me today, on this anniversary, is just how poor the Apollo 11 photo documentation was. No, not the scientific documentation, I mean the photography of the astronauts, by onboard cameras and by the astronauts themselves.

Now, I know that it was a different time, and that in those days NASA wasn't as media-savvy as it is now. In those days there was no such thing as "Outreach", not really, and no-one gave a stuff about taking photos purely for aesthetic or PR reasons. And Apollo 11 was a knife-edge mission, with literally every second accounted for and no time in the schedule for taking pretty, or historic pictures. With just a few hours to spend on the surface, collecting literally priceless rocks and testing new, untried hardware and life support systems, Armstrong and Aldrin were racing the clock from the very moment they landed, so I guess it's no surprise that there are so few "pretty pictures" of Tranquility Base and the historic first landing.

If Apollo 11 was happening now, today, things would be VERY different. We now live in the internet age, when not just spaceflight enthusiasts but the public are ravenous for images from space. Today, spaceprobe images of Saturn and Mars, and pictures of spacewalking astronauts are posted online within hours of them being taken. No doubt when the first NASA astronauts Return To The Moon around 20Whenever, and eventually reach Mars in 30Yeah Right, things will be very different, and every single step, shuffle and bounce will be photographed with several cameras, including in IMAX and 3D formats. I can't wait for that...

But even though the 1960s were a different world to today, I can't help thinking - and I don't want to sound churlish or ungrateful here - that NASA as a whole, and Neil and Buzz personally, really botched the Apollo 11 EVA. There were so many pictures they could, and should, have taken. Admittedly the recording of Neil's descent down Eagle's ladder was at the mercy of the technology of the age, and there was probably no way they could have done much better than this...

... but seriously, why were no proper photographs of Neil Armstrong taken on the surface? What the hell happened there? This was one of the most historic events in the history of Mankind, for pity's sake. It will never, ever, EVER be repeated. It was the day when the first human being set foot on another world, as historic as the day the asteroid slammed into Earth 65m years ago, allowing mammals to stage their evolutionary coup; as historic as Columbus' landing in the New World; as historic as the first flight of the Wright Flyer. History will forever be split into two periods - Before Apollo 11, and After Apollo 11, it's as simple as that. And yet, there are no crystal clear, high resolution, posed images of The First Man To Stand On Another World. It's unbelievable, isn't it?

Everyone is familiar with this image, which is rightly celebrated as being The definitive image from the Apollo program...

... but the fact is that that's a classic, beautiful, dramatic photo of the second man on the Moon, not the first, which is - and I mean absolutely no offence to Buzz Aldrin here - ridiculous, isn't it? In fact, there are only a couple of images that clearly show Neil Armstrong on the Moon. Here's the most recent to turn up...

And do you know who took that? No, not Buzz Aldrin - Neil Armstrong took that photo of himself! What you're seeing there is actually a very tight crop of Buzz Aldrin's visor, where Neil is being reflected. So the picture above is actually Neil Armstrong taking the previous picture...

I know hindsight is always perfect, but I have never for the life of me been able to understand why - as he obviously wasn't minded to, for whatever personal reason - Buzz Aldrin wasn't TOLD by Mission Control to take at least a few decent imagesof Neil Armstrong for posterity. If he had done, if he had taken just one image of Neil next to the flag, or looking up at the Earth, or standing at the foot of the LEM, then on anniversaries like today we would be able to celebrate Apollo 11 properly, and look at an image of the first man on the Moon that was uplifting and inspiring, and not mourn lost chances.

In fact, although there are other astronauts' faces visible almost accidentally in some EVA footage, and you can see the astronauts' faces on some film clips showing them coming down the ladder (like this clip ), during the whole Apollo program, only once - on the very last flight to the Moon - to my knowledge did an astronaut think to deliberately lift his visor and pose for a picture showing a real life human being standing and smiling on the Moon in his spacesuit, humanising the whole thing...

(Jack Schmitt, Apollo 17)

Is this important? Well, in many ways, no. It doesn't lessen the achievements of Apollo 11, or the Apollo program as a whole. It doesn't reduce the stature of Armstrong. It doesn't "matter" I suppose. But I just can't help wondering what the effect on the public would have been in there had been at least one 'heroic' or 'dramatic' image taken of Armstrong on that day, 39 years ago. Buzz Aldrin has been a superb ambassador for NASA and manned spaceflight. But what would have happened if a photo of Neil Armstrong standing on the Moon had been the one on the cover of LIFE and every newspaper around the world? How might history have been different? Might Armstrong himself have been persuaded to come out of his shell a bit more, and talk to more people about the mission, his experiences and feelings? Would he have become a lunar John Boone, (Red Mars), able to hypnotise crowds and inspire future generations of explorers?

Ah, we'll never know.

What we do know is that Next Time things will be different. When NASA returns to the Moon it will be EVERYWHERE. The first astronauts to go back to the Moon will be the housemates in the first ever space version of "Big Brother", with their every move watched and their every word overheard. (Well, maybe not EVERY one, but most). The Orion lander will have webcams inside it, and NASA TV will offer live streaming video of the activities inside the capsule. The astronauts will write their own blogs during the mission. A robot lander already sent down to the landing site will beam back live HD footage of the capsule touching down, and of the astronauts descending to the lunar surface too. And every day we'll be able to go to a website and watch HD clips of the day's activities and download high resolution images taken by the astronauts as they bounce and boing around the Moon...

But that's all in the future, the year 20Whenever. Today's a day to look back... at what was...

... and what might have been...

("A Delicate Balance" - painting of Neil Armstrong by Apollo astronaut Alan Bean)

UPDATE:

Since writing the above blog entry I've had a couple of people correct me on a few things, and also provide me with some amazing information about Apollo and the whole "visors and helmets" thing. So I thought that rather than just re-write the entry and make out that I hadn't made any mistakes in the first place I'd let it stand to show how I was wrong about a few things, and how I learned the actual truth thanks to some great friends over at unmannedspaceflight.com. Some of what follows might be new to you too, because the truth is pretty amazing...!

Okay... firstly, it seems I was TOTALLY wrong about Harrison Schmitt raising his visor deliberately to allow his picture to be taken. As Apollo enthusiast and expert dvandorn on UMSF - and velcrot, in his comment below - pointed out, Harrison's visor was pretty badly scratched early on in the mission, so he chose to keep it raised during the EVAs so he could see out of it properly. The guys at Mission Control weren't happy about that, at all, but Schmitt insisted on keeping it raised because, as a geologist, he understandably wanted as clear a view of the incredible rocks he was studying as possible...

Secondly - and this is the most amazing revelation to me of all - it seems that there is actually quite awealth of footage and images showing the faces of Apollo astronauts on the Moon, and one very famous Apollo 11 image (no, not that one) actually shows, if you look closely, Buzz Aldrin's face through his visor! WHAT?!?!?! This was news to me! I'd looked at this iconic image of Buzz Aldrin standing by the Stars and Stripes hundreds if not thousands of times...

... but I'd never noticed, until UMSF's ilbasso pointed it out to me, that if you look closely at Aldrin's apparrently opaque visor you see... well, this...

That's Buzz Aldrin's face turned towards the camera! How have I missed seeing that all these years?!?! I mean, I must have shown that image dozens of times when giving my Outreach talks and I swear I've never seen Buzz's face staring out at me before. Unbelievable...

This is, to be totally honest, a bit disturbing for me. I thought I "knew" Apollo, or at least the basics, and one of those basics was that we never got to see the faces of Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon, just their gold-plated visors reflecting distorted versions of the landscape and hardware around them... Now it turns out that not only could we see Aldrin's face, but it has been there all along, staring at me since I was a child. That's a bit of a disconcerting discovery, to be frank. I don't know if I should feel like a complete stoopid idiot, or pleased that fresh life has been breathed into the whole Apollo adventure for me...

Anyway, there you go. Writing this blog post has been quite an experience! It started off as a simple, gloomy requiem for images that weren't taken and opportunities that weren't grasped, and has turned into an unexpected celebration!

Maybe I should change the title to "Apollo - History Made, and Lost... and Found Again..."

New Phoenix pictures gallery now online...

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 07:13:11 GMT

I've come to realise that this place is getting a bit, well, cluttered, so I've decided to set up a special "gallery" page just for my Phoenix pictures, and just post links to updates here rather than the actual images themselves. So, I'd like to invite you all to come over to see my new place...

... by clicking here...

The colours of Mars...

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:54:08 GMT

Two new images for you tonight... Firstly, a colourised image showing the latest activity in the trench where Phoenix is scraping up ice, ready for testing in the TEGA oven... no particular scientific value to this, I just love the oil-on-water rainbow effect...

( Full size version here )

And, my own new favourite, an image showing some of the dust grains and rocky fragments being studied by Phoenix's microscope... Now, I know for a fact that these colours are NOT realistic, even though I just used the same process as I use for my 'normal' pictures, but they're so beautiful I honestly don't care. This is one of my favourite "Stu colour" Mars images ever...!

( Full size version here )

Carnival time again...

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:34:16 GMT

Yes, it's time to go and have a wander around the weekly "Carnival of Space" again... how the days fly... This week's Carnival (#64!!!) is being held over at The Music Of The Spheres, and there's some really good blogging on there for you to enjoy this week. Go take a look!

Phoenix sees the martian Midnight Sun...

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:51:55 GMT

Now this is just an unashamedly cool picture...

Er... what is it? Well, the title of the post probably gave it away... that's a composite image made of more than a dozen different Phoenix images, showing the Sun dipping towards, sliding above and then climbing up away from the martian horizon. See how it never sets? That's because Phoenix is way, way up high in the martian arctic... in Mars' "Land of the Midnight Sun"...

There's a (much) larger version here for you to enjoy...

Gorgeous, isn't it? I've waited a long time, many, many years to see that picture. I wonder what it would look like in colour...? Hmmm, maybe something like this...

Full size version here...

"From A Distance"

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 21:53:07 GMT

Remember I posted a few days ago about an amazing and quite beautiful animation of the Moon passing in front of the Earth, as seen by "EPOXI", (the spaceprobe formerly known as DEEP IMPACT..)? Well, I am delighted - and very honoured - to be able to tell you all that the EPOXI team have very generously put a poem of mine, inspired by the animation, up on their mission website!

So, if you want to see it, have a wander over to the EPOXI site and read my poem "From A Distance"... and thanks to everyone on the EPOXI team, especially Elizabeth Warner!

Midnight Shadows...

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 07:09:47 GMT

Okay, I've tried something a little different with images from Phoenix this time, and I have to say I'm VERY pleased with the result...

The latest batch of black and white raw images from the Phoenix lander included several sets of images of the same scene, taken around midnight and into the early hours, to allow scientists to monitor the scene for changes - maybe frost formation, I think. Anyway, I had a go at colourising them and this is typical of what I got...

Then I thought "Hang on... 3 images of the same scene... I could animate that...maybe show the shadows moving around the rocks..?" So, I took the three colourised images...

... put them into Paint Shop Pro's "Animation" application, and this is what came out the other end...

(click on the image to see the animation, or click on the link below for a higher quality one...)

"Midnight Shadows"

3D Special...

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 18:48:28 GMT

Okay, time to get your 3D glasses out and enjoy some amazing three dimensional views of the Phoenix landing site...

Phoenix's scoop poised over trench

Phoenix's scoop in the trench

Trench after scoop has been removed

Next best thing to being there, I think :-)

It's opening...! It's open!!

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 17:09:02 GMT

Put up the bunting and balloons, break out the bubbly and stick "Agadoo" on the stereo. It's time for a party! New images sent back by the Mars Phoenix lander show... well, I'll show you what they show...

That picture will be the cause of great celebrations in Phoenix mission control because it shows that the doors to oven #0 on the troubled TEGA oven have opened succesfully, and TOTALLY, and the oven is now ready to accept another sample of martian dirt.

There had been concerns that the jamming problems encountered during the opening of two other sets of doors - on the opposite side of the oven - would be repeated with this oven, but it looks like everything has gone perfectly. So, within a fw days Phoenix's scoop will reach down, gather up some priceless samples of martian ice, and then deposit them into the oven...

Congratulations to everyone on the Phoenix team, who have been under huge pressure to work this problem out. Great job guys! :-)

Opportunity: a Real robot hero...

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 11:35:30 GMT

WELCOME TO CARNIVAL OF SPACE READERS!

Almost 50 days after its heart-stopping touch-down on Mars, high in the never-seen-before martian arctic, the Phoenix lander is still basking in the media spotlight. Its mission is being followed avidly by countless thousands of space enthusiasts and armchair solar system tourists around the world, and every day – or “sol” – entranced men, women and children from almost every country on Earth are going online to look at the latest pictures taken by the lander, showing the landing site’s rocks, some smooth, some pitted, its polygon-embroidered landscape and the huge, dome-like sky that looms above it. A quick click of their mouse takes them to the University of Arizona or NASA webpages featuring the most recent Updates written by the Phoenix team, and another click will zoom them over to the lander’s own blog-like Twitter page, where they can read the latest news as written by the lander itself. Well, kind of. It doesn’t matter who’s writing the cheeky, cute entries; as I write this Phoenix’s Twitter page has almost 29 THOUSAND “followers”, which shows just how fascinated not just the planet’s science geeks but the general public are by this mission.

And yet, many – most, probably – of them are blissfully unaware that as Phoenix gingerly reaches out with her robot arm to gather up another scoopful of martian dirt and drop it into one of its suite of 8 ovens, halfway around Mars, and much further south, a small robot rover is nearing what many think will be the end of its journey, a journey that will surely go down in history as one of the most epic, brave and determined treks ever made in the spirit of exploration and discovery, by a machine or a human being.

Forget Wall-E. You want a real robot hero? Look no further than a plucky little Mars Exploration Rover that just won’t stop roving, no matter what Mars, or the universe, throws at it.

Deep in the heart of the huge Meridiani Plain, the Mars Exploration Rover “Opportunity” is inching, slowly but surely, towards the base of a towering cliff called Cape Verde, one of a dozen or so rocky outcrops and promontories that jut out of the crumbling, serrated rim of a massive impact crater called Victoria. The rover didn’t land anywhere near this crater. It landed several miles away, much further north, and had to drive for many, many months to reach it. Along the way it encountered and studied other, smaller craters; got itself stuck in a potentially lethal dust dune sea; was battered and assaulted – and almost killed – by a raging martian dust storm. It should, really, not have survived long enough to get even halfway to Victoria – it was only designed to last for three months on the harsh martian surface. And yet, while Phoenix grabs all the attention and all the glory further north, looking for ice and analysing crumbs of martian dirt in its onboard laboratory, further south, more than 4 years – 4 years! – into its 90 day mission, a dust-covered, sand-blasted and travel weary Opportunity is now almost within touching distance of a towering wall of martian rock that has called to her, siren-like, for almost two years.

Unlike Wall-E, which zips and skips about like a mad thing, Opportunity – or “Oppy” as she is affectionately known to space enthusiasts and Mars fans around the world – moves slowly, oh so slowly. A double-figure number of metres moved in a day is Oppy’s idea of “putting the pedal to the metal”, although she has managed to make mad dashes of 200m or more on crazy days. Imagine how you would feel travelling at such a pace. Imagine crawling into town to go shopping, or just travelling up your street moving just three or four metres at a time, stopping and starting, stopping and starting, the scenery around you barely changing from one day to the next… But the twin Mars rovers know no such frustration, they are as patient and undistracted as continental plates and move only slightly faster.

For four long years now, Oppy has rolled forwards slowly, sol after sol, crossing off a few metres at a time, crawling across the rock-strewn, dust-clogged face of Mars like a metal and glass turtle, wheels whirring, camera eyes scanning the distant horizon in search of something new to photograph and explore. It’s easy to dismiss her trek as slow and ponderous, and just as easy – maybe even justified – to point out that a man or woman astronaut, even cocooned inside a bulky spacesuit and carrying a big bag of geology equipment, could have travelled the same distance in a single sol, or maybe two. In fact, plotting Oppy’s Trek on a map of Mars is easy: just Google for a Mars map, print it out onto an A4 sheet, prick a pin into it, anywhere you like, and on that scale the rover has travelled the width of that pin prick hole since landing in 2004.

But that’s not the point. The point is that it’s been an incredible journey. After bouncing and rolling in spectacular “martian hole in one” fashion smack into Eagle Crater after landing, in just her first year on Mars, Oppy explored several other craters, including a large crater called Endurance. After rolling gingerly into Endurance 130 days after landing, the little rover studied its intriguingly layered walls and boulder-scattered floor before heading out onto the open plain again, to trundle up to and study the twisted, turned-inside-out wreckage of her own heatshield and study an iron meteorite that had landed nearby who-knows-how-many millennia before her own fiery descent through Barsoom’s thin atmosphere.

But then, decision time. After the beauty and drama of exploring the outside and then the inside of Endurance Crater, Oppy’s controllers wondered “Where next?” Nowhere was ‘around the corner’ or ‘within easy reach’. Where next, then? Orbital images showed a large crater, “Victoria”, off to the south, but it was waaaay off to the south, a many-months-drive away. Too far away, surely, even though it was a tempting target, with its numerous bays, cliffs, dust dune rippled floor and mysterious dark plumes. Impossible… right…?

Wrong. With nowhere else to explore, and the promise of amazing scientific data luring them onwards, the rover’s drivers pointed Oppy’s nose towards the south and told her to start driving – and not stop until she reached the rim of far Victoria. It was the start of a journey of exploration and discovery that will surely godown in the annals of not just space exploration history, but History itself.

And THIS is the point. This “plucky little rover” was only designed to roam Mars for three months, and yet, four years later, she’s STILL roving, her wheels are still turning, her eyes are still wide with wonder. She’s thick with dust in places, scratched and dented in others no doubt, and after just one year of trundling over ridges of brittle rock, rolling around the rims of and into the dust-smothered hearts of ancient craters and cowering from the relentless hissing of the dusty, rasping martian wind, no-one would blame her if she just suddenly ground wearily to a halt and declared “Enough!” and never moved again…

But she didn’t stop after a year. She set off for a brand new goal, a crater called Victoria, a crater that many thought she would die before seeing up close.

The first leg of the journey was slow, ponderously slow, with day after day of nothing much to look at. Oppy slogged onwards, relentlessly driving south, as if migrating, looking at a rock here, a dust dune there, stopping at every small unimpressive-looking crater along the route, not just to do science but to break the monotony of the journey, too. And all the time she was dwarfed by the great wide horizon around it and the massive Meridiani sky above.

Of course not everything went smoothly. No great journey does. On Sol 446 Oppy drove into, and found herself firmly trapped in, a dust bank. And there she stayed for the next 50 or so days, stuck, lodged firm, a ship becalmed on the great wide open dust ocean of Meridiani. Controllers back on Earth labelled the dune “Purgatory”, and tried again and again to free the rover from its grip, without success. But finally Oppy hauled herself out of her dusty prison and resumed her long slog south in search of Victiria…

Up ahead, the raised rim of Erebus Crater beckoned first, and after travelling another 3 months to reach it Oppyspent another 159 sols exploring and studying it before setting off once again into the soul-suckingly empty badlands of Meridiani. Finally, on around Sol 929, half a thousand days after beginning her Trek, after half a thousand sunrises and sunsets, with just a razor flat horizon ahead of her, on one wonderful day she panned her unblinking silicon eyes across the skyline and saw… this…

Suddenly the horizon broke apart, splitting into two light bands, each one a jumble of light and dark patches and blocks, with a hint of a dark… something… between them. It was the rim, the edge of Victoria Crater, and Oppy was within a few days drive of it.

Around the world Mars enthusiasts and MER followers rejoiced at the sight of the crater rim up ahead, in the same way that sailors have rejoiced for centuries upon seeing land again after a seemingly endless voyage. Now, up ahead, almost close enough to touch, was a New Place, a New Landscape – the widest, deepest, most impressive crater seen by Oppy – by either rover – so far. Image enthusiasts on the Unmannedspaceflight.com forum pounced on the black and white filtered “raw” images like sharks attacking a wounded seal, and even though the resolution and quality of those first images was very poor in comparison to what would come later, within a matter of a few minutes of those raws appearing on the NASA websites UMSF’s “Image mages” had created stunning mosaics, panoramas and colourisations, many hours before NASA itself did so.

Then the excitement level rose even higher; even though the first raws were blocky, garishly-highlighted and crude, they could be used by some of the imaging enthusiasts to tease out details of the crater’s structure not immediately obvious, and within half an hour of the first crater rim image appearing we knew that Victoria’s edge hid rockfalls, cliff faces and more, and that all those things would be revealed to us soon. It was a giddy time, with everyone delighting in the new views and looking forward to much, much better views to come…

And as the days passed, and Oppy – almost as if she herself was impatient to see the inside of the crater for herself, after being starved of beauty for so long – surged forwards. The twin bands on the horizon began to move apart, resolving into the near and far rims of a vast circular wound in Mars’ crust that took the breath away. Glued to my keyboard, hypnotised by my screen, I followed the so-called “Final Approach to Victoria” on UMSF and via NASA’s websites and I could almost hear Oppy laughing as she rolled forwards, almost running now, as eager to reach the rim as a child desperate to splash into the foam-rolled edge of the ocean after seeing it through a car window for so long. Around the world Mars enthusiasts waited for new images to come in, refreshing NASA’s picture gallery websites again and again, each time hoping that this time they’d see a page of new images… but all we could do was sit and wait –

Then a new list of images appeared, and clicking on one we found that the ground had simply opened up in front of Oppy and a chasm now lay ahead.

(my colourisation of NASA raw images)

It was as if a pair of giant hands had reached down from the pale pink sky and pulled the great plain of Meridiani apart, parting the layers of rock and stone like Moses parting the Red Sea…

Oppy was almost there. We were almost there. Almost on the edge of Victoria.

But there was still a little way to go. All Oppy could see were tantalising hints of what lay inside the crater, beneath its shattered rim. And it took another sol for Oppy to actually reach the edge of the crater… but when she did, many of us didn’t know whether to punch the air in celebration or sink to the floor and burst into tears of relief, wonder and joy…

Victoria was beautiful.

(image: panorama by mhoward, UMSF)

Oppy was standing on the edge of a round chasm, with sharp, steep cliffs and rock faces all around its circumference, stabbing out from its crumbling rim. To the left of Oppy, a tall, blocky cliff face rose up into the sky, its base surrounded by countless blocks and shards of shattered, fallen stone; to the right another, equally imposing cliff rose up, showing off its own precariously-balanced blocks and stratified layers. Between and beyond them, and framed by them, the crater floor was covered by a wind-sculpted, beautifully rippled sea of undulating dust dunes, as if gentle waves rolling across the surface of a dusty, dirty water lake that had once shone in the sunlight there had been flash frozen by some magnificent martian ice dragon. I couldn't help making another - crude - colourisation...

It was magnificent, just maginificent, and many of us thought as we looked at those pictures that if Oppy died right there, right then, she would have fulfilled her destiny by showing us such an incredible place.

We were wrong. We short-changed her. Oppy’s real adventure was only just beginning…

Oppy hasn’t just rolled almost halfway around Victoria’s edge, taking tens of thousands of stunning images, before returning to the place where she actually arrived in the first place, “Duck Bay”; on sol 1291, to the joy and admiration of every Mars enthusiast and armchair explorer watching, she drove slowly but surely down the gentle slope of “Duck Bay” and into the great crater itself, making detailed measurements of the composition of the rocks and layers she found beneath the rim of the crater. She then turned hard to port and began to move slowly towards what many have always thought was her ultimate destiny and will be her finest hour – reaching out and touching the fractured, finely-layered rocky face of one of Victioria Crater’s cliffs.

Over the past week we’ve watched the face and base of Cape Verde get closer and closer, and get steadily bigger and more impressive-looking, in Oppy’s viewfinder. Now, rocks around its base that were previously just tiny light and dark specks in the distance are clearly big and heavy and hard blocks of rough martian stone, carved and etched into fantastic, literally alien shapes and structures by the sand-blasting winds that howl around the cliffs…

(full size version)

...there are cracks and cave mouths in the cliff face itself, hiding wonderful geological secrets, and the layers visible on the cliff face are breathtaking, as thin and dry as the leaves of an ancient, dusty spellbook…

But the best view is the wide angle view, and two of Unmannedspaceflight.com’s most accomplished Image mages – AstroO and James Canvin - have created what might well turn out to be the definitive picture to come out of the entire Mars Exploration Rover mission. Here it is, reproduced with their kind permission…

That can't even begin to do it justice, so go take a look at the full size version here...

Look what we did. Wow, just look what we did. We imagined, designed and built a robot that then flew to Mars, landed in a crater, and then trekked for more than seven miles to reach that cliff… and in a matter of days, all being well, it will reach out and actually touch the cold, dusty rock of Mars with its robot hand. And when it does, it will be touching that rock for all of us. Its hand will be our hands.

Like I said, if you want a robot hero, there’s no need to invent one. All you have to do is go online and follow the epic trek of Opportunity as it draws to its close.

There’s a real robot heroine for you.