NASA did post a photo such as you described except they don't actually show us the rover. I find this rather odd but not surprising. Perhaps Spirit rover is being dismantled and this is why it is overlaid this it shape.
All they would need to do would be to post something like this and we could see what had gone from the poor old rover.
I know they cannot do it now the rover has no power left, but as I say, I am sure they have one of these somewhere. (taken after Spirit stuck in the sand and before the power failed) How about it Mr Squyres?
<< What I want to know is - In this article, who took the picture of Spirit? >>
I have come across this image before. It would appear the image is an artist's impression. The reason it was produced was probably to assist the ground crew in ascertaining whether or not Spirit could extract itself from the soft sand that is currently impeding the rover's progress.
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Revealing a truth denied by science becomes a revolutionary act.
There are panoramas taken with the pancam which include the rover itself, so why dont we have a panorama like this?
Raise the camera head to its fullest extent and take a picture through any of the cameras (apart from the MI) and we will see the true state of the Rover. The cameras can focus from about 1m onwards and the arm is a little more than 1m long so why not?
No reason.
I bet they have done that already, but not for us.
This panorama of images from the Spirit rover, taken on Sol 1925 (June 2, 2009), is helping engineers assess the rover's current state and plan her extraction from the soft soil in the region now called "Troy." The images were taken by Spirit's microscopic imager instrument, mounted on the end of her robotic arm.
This is the first time the microscopic imager has been used to assist in planning a rover's escape from an embedding event. The imager isn't intended to take these types of images--it is designed to focus on targets only 6 centimeters (2.4 inches) in front of its optics. As a result, the images in this mosaic are well out of focus. Yet despite the focus and the backlighting of the scene, the mosaic is still very useful for helping to assess the rover's state. The mosaic, which is rotated to show the true orientation of the rover relative to the local terrain, shows the underside of the rover, the depth to which the wheels are embedded and the terrain itself in sufficient detail.
The Universe today article I linked to has another similar image of a 'stuck Rover' but it actually says under the image that it is a composite. Yes, of course the one above is a made-up picture, but nothing is said and we are supposed to assume that it is a real image of Spirit on Mars.
Still no real pictures of where the stuck Rover is and what is its condition. That is why people have to generate them.
As my previous thread says, I reckon it is dismantled by now and we will never have any further images. I am absolutely certain that NASA have all the gory details of the dismantling process from their orbiters though. It is rather convenient that all communication has been lost.
I asked a 'knowledgable person' from another forum if there were any more images of the stuck spirit and they only provided me with the link to Gusev crater posted above which does not show any rover at all (as far as I can see).
We should try and think where we can ask for this information and post the results here. I am absolutely certain there will be no genuine images anyway.
OK, excuse my sense of humour and that this is a one-liner...but I can just imagine a martian walking by, taking off the pancam or one of the cams and then sending back an image to show us what has happened to our vehicle .LOLOLOLOL
I thought we all may be interested in this link posted by goggog in the Useful Links thread. It shows Spirit stuck in the sand and the translation from French is here (10 marks for anyone noticing the anomaly)
In case the image disappears, I have copied it for relative posterity...
Credit: A.Martian
The only other picture I have seen is this one taken from the Mars Orbiter. If anyone has found any other images of Spirit, I would be really interested to see them along with the name of the photographer who snapped the pic!