I didn’t notice last week, but Hans Nyberg put up another Quicktime VR photo of the landscape around Spirit. Somehow, the black & white image is more compelling than the color one, just conveying the bleakness with the rocks and hills. The resolution of the PanCam images is just really impressive.

I came across a paper by the guys who designed and built the MER cameras from 2001, available at http://robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/people/mwm/papers/spie01/homepage.html. I worked with Mark Schwochert when I handled the vibration testing for all the MER cameras, and he’s a really neat fellow. To me, it’s amazing that they were able to use a very similar design for all four camera types: the NavCam, HazCam, Microscopic Imager, and PanCam. The only difference between them is the lens type, as far as I remember. The interfaces are all identical.