[Editor note: Blog post by Emily Lakdawalla, the Planetary Society] After analyzing the HiRISE coverage of the Curiosity landing site, I thought it would be easier to analyze Opportunity coverage, because I’d developed some good strategies along the way. Although those strategies helped, it has turned out to be much harder to summarize the Opportunity coverage than it was to summarize the Curiosity coverage, and in fact this post was two years in the making.
But I’ve finally done it: I’ve located all the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE images covering the Opportunity field site, and figured out which parts of Opportunity’s mission each one covers, and where to look for the rover and other hardware. Hopefully this effort will be useful to a few of you, academics if no one else! I’ve titled it “version 1.0″ because I’m hopeful there will be a few more images to add later (more on that below). [More at link]