I am constantly on the look out for signs of the rovers being dismantled. If I were a small person on Mars with a robot spying on me, I would want to disable it as quickly as I could. It I was very small, then it may take some time before explorers got to the parts of the robot that sent back the information. Stretching the imagination eh?
The missing information could be due to 'drop out' when the information is uploaded from the rover to the orbiter for sending back to Earth.
There is another possibility, that probably NASA have not even considered, and that is ground based RF interference from an unknown source which is temporarily jamming the transmission from the rover.
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
Yes, these are solar pictures but that it not what I am referring to. I am referring to the large blocks of black within the images themselves which means that there was a problem with acquiring the data? - Is that correct ?
Opportunity's pictures are getting worse and worse - at least the Pancam ones are for the last couple of sols posted on the http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportunity.html page
2377 & 2379 have many black areas which we are told is missing data. I wonder what is happening. It cannot be the winter lack of sun because that is over now. Has anyone seen anything posted that explains this loss of data? Just like Spirit, maybe the Martians have finally got to it...
The pictures themselves are pretty grainy and dark too.
