The black box indicates the Ares Vallis region where Mars Pathfinder was scheduled to land 2 days later. The white box indicates the general region into which Mars Pathfinder landed. The wide, straight valley entering the map from the lower right is Ares Vallis.
North is up in both images.
These features allowed the Mars Pathfinder team to quickly identify the location of the lander in the Ares Vallis setting. Image has been map-projected so that north is up. Illumination is from the upper left. Prior to the Mars Global Surveyor mission, this was the highest-resolution image of the area. These lines were published in Science, v. 278, p. 1746, December 5, 1997.