Sun Imaging though the Martian Atmosphere

This paper discusses the sun images acquired with the panoramic cameras (pancam) on the Mars exploration rovers. The mission goals, the camera design, the data processing and the results are discussed. Each of the two rovers has two cameras, one with a bandpass filter centered at 880 nm and one centered at 440 nm. It is observed that some of the pancams show ghost images. Based on analysis of the images, the transparency of the martian atmosphere (τ) is estimated to be ~0.9. A seasonal change in τ is observed.