albright wrote:
Icarus wrote:

I viewed the area from the two images at the same scale side
by side, and the resolution looks very similar to me. Very
small pebbles visible in the panorama shot are also visible
in the navigation camera shot (especially if you tweak the
contrast and brightness), so I can't really see how something
as obvious as the object in the panorama shot could be
present at the time the second picture was taken and not be
visible at all.

looks like the field is different in the two pictures and the
nav pictures does not go far enough "south" (if you see
what I mean) to get the object into view ...

Have a look at this and see what you think:

http://www.envf.port.ac.uk/jr/object.html

The image on the left is from the Sol 002 panoramic image, the
one on the right is from the Sol 005 navigation camera image.