The NASA Mars team is proudly showing off the first full colour image sent home by its busy little Spirit rover. The picture is the highest-resolution photo ever taken on the planet's surface.

The image of the planet's barren, rock-strewn landscape is a mosaic of 12 separate pictures shot by Spirit's panoramic camera, or Pancam. It covers a 45-degree field of view of the terrain where Spirit made its flawless landing late Saturday.

The image presented Tuesday makes up just one-eighth of a sweeping full panorama that Spirit continues to shoot. The full shot should be transmitted to Earth over the next week.

Jim Bell, the NASA team member they call "the guy with the cool camera," narrated the postcard slide show for reporters Tuesday. Pointing out the features of the terrain around the rover, Bell says the pictures are already raising new questions for scientists, such as why they're not seeing as many giant boulders as they have in previous missions.

The spectacular images are being made possible in part by Canadian technology. Imaging sensors in Spirit's nine cameras are made by DALSA Corporation, headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario.

Workers in DALSA's Bromont, Que., plant manufactured the sensors, called charge-coupled devices, for NASA in 2000.

The image sensors are high-end versions of the same chip used in consumer digital cameras. The plant sent NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory 624 CCDs, and the space agency carried out extensive tests to choose the final 18 CCD arrays - one each for the cameras on each rover.

Now the images Spirit is sending will is allow scientists to map out where the rover will go next.

"It was very, very cool to see those images. Everybody should be proud here," DALSA's Raymond Frost told CTV News.

On Monday, NASA unveiled a three-dimensional panoramic view of Mars created by patching together black-and-white images the rover has been transmitting since it landed.

The image, seen to full effect through red and green "3-D glasses," reveal a flat surface peppered with small and medium-sized rocks surrounding Spirit.

Spirit began sending home snapshots of its rocky environs just hours after landing over the weekend. Those first images included the airbags, a sun dial on the rover as well as portions of the craft.

Over the next 10 days, the rover will prepare to begin moving around the Red Planet as it transforms from photographer to robotic geologist, testing the composition of Mars. The rovers will then spend 90 days analyzing Martian rocks and soil for clues that could reveal whether the planet was ever capable of sustaining life.

NASA built the rovers in the $820-million project to prospect for evidence that liquid water -- a necessary ingredient for life -- once persisted on the surface of the planet.

A second rover, Opportunity, launched in July, is expected to land on the other side of the Red Planet on Jan. 24.

Spirit is the fourth spacecraft to arrive successfully on Mars. Twenty other spacecraft from various nations have failed.

The European Space Agency is still searching for their Beagle Two probe that was supposed to parachute onto Mars on Christmas Day. It never sent a signal to confirm a safe landing.