Here’s another undercarriage view made with the MAHLI on Sol 476. I guess they’re still concerned about the wiring.

This time we have a nice front Hazcam shot of the MAHLI itself, pointed back at the front of Curiosity. It’s that little gizmo to the left of the “phone dial”, which is the APXS :

You’ll notice it’s an anaglyph! Most of the MSL raw image gallery is in stereo pairs, so I downloaded a free anaglyph maker ( anamk108 ) and it works well for me.

Curiosity has been dawdling near this spot for several sols, after making several good runs between sol 456 and sol 472. Here is a panoramic Mastcam view from sol 456, taken in the direction of travel. Note the small peak, or “rise” on the left, and the more distant “pass” or “canyon” appearing on the horizon to the right of center:

As Curiosity moved forward, the change in perspective on the rock patterns in front of the small peak were evident. Here is an attempt I made to triangulate between this sol 456 view and a later sol 465 NAVCAM view:

I wasn’t real sure about the foreground here, but I think the lines are about right.

Moving ahead to sol 470, we can see in this Mastcam panorama that Curiosity is much closer to the “canyon”, and it is not really a huge feature, but it does seem to be a little more spectacular than Yellowknife Bay.

I spent a lot of time staring at these rocks, but I couldn’t really line everything up. This is around when I decided to try the anaglyph idea. There is a lot of vertical relief in the form of a “rolling prairie” effect which is not evident in the raw images, since everything is littered with rocks. Here is a sol 470 Navcam anaglyph looking towards the “canyon”.

On sol 472, Curiosity was getting very close to this feature, and was adjacent to a large “sand pit” in front of it. In the foreground are several large rocks, which I felt I should be able to pick out in the sol 470 views, but I was having trouble doing this:

Of significant help was another anaglyph, from sol 472 this time, also showing these rocks in the foreground.

In the anaglyph, you can see that the large dark rock near the center is actually elevated a bit, and more to the foreground than it appears in the raw image. In the sol 470 anaglyph, it appears to be more even with the rock behind it, and this threw me off. These two rocks appear near the top left corner of the sol 470 anaglyph, and to the left of center in the far midground of the sol 470 Mastcam view, where they are fairly prominent.

When Curiosity moves past this “canyon”, I think it will be in new territory, and the changes in the landscape will continue as it finally approaches its “base camp” for the ascent of Mt. Sharp.