See a Martian milestone in 3-D

[n2doc]

Alan Boyle says: After two years of trekking across Mars' Meridiani Planum, NASA's Opportunity rover has passed the halfway point in its 12-mile journey to a monster crater. This 3-D postcard celebrates the milestone — and the scientists on the Mars rover team are celebrating as well.
"The good news is that the worst part of the journey is over," Matt Golombek, a geologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told me today. "The rest should be more fun than previous."
The full 3-D panorama, based on image data collected on Aug. 19, gives you a sense of what's ahead for Opportunity, six and a half years after it landed on the Red Planet. (Be sure to put on your red-blue glasses, or check out the 2-D, black-and-white image.) The raised rim of 13-mile-wide Endeavour Crater, Opportunity's destination, is barely visible on the horizon.
To get to this point, Opportunity had to make a circuitous detour around dune fields with impassably high ripples of sand. That detour added more than four miles to the estimated drive distance between Endeavour and Victoria Crater, the place from which Opportunity started out in September 2008. Now Opportunity has a straight shot ahead. Right in front of the rover, there's lots of interesting bedrock to study. After one or two miles of outcrops, there's about four miles of "almost smooth sand" leading to the crater's rim, Golombek said. A 100-yard-wide (90-meter-wide) impact site, dubbed Santa Maria Crater, serves as an intermediate point of interest.

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