Here's the first of what will be many to follow – a spectacular mosaic of color images taken at various elevations along a single azimuth. This particular image is monocular, taken from just one of the pair of cameras on the mast. Soon we'll see similar examples in pairs, one from each camera, giving us stereo views just like our own eyes give us. Then we'll see the same scene with the added dimension of depth.
Those polygonal hummocks really jump out at me. I've very similar terrain in parts of Alaska and northern Finland. While driving through Finland I stopped to get out and look at this odd landscape, for at the time I had no idea what caused it. Just scraping with my foot a couple of inches deep got me into soil mixed with small chunks of ice (this was in April, almost at the northern border of Finland). Another inch or two down, and I ran into solid ice with embedded soil particles. Seeing this terrain provoked me into reading up on it, and from that reading I discovered that these polygons are the natural result of millenia of freezing and thawing cycles. When the liquid water freezes, it expands and moves the soil particles about – and eventually, through a complicated but predictable process, these polygonal hummocks form. I think the chances of them finding water ice just under this soil are very good, just based on my own observations in Finland...
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