Mars Opportunity Discoveries @ 8 Years

The Mars rover Opportunity was supposed to last three months. It's now going on Nine Years. It's proved so durable that in 2011 it was essentially sent on a whole new mission.

Opportunity reached a multi-year driving destination, Endeavour Crater, in August 2011. At Endeavour's rim, it has gained access to geological deposits from an earlier period of Martian history than anything it examined during its first seven years. It also has begun an investigation of the planet's deep interior that takes advantage of staying in one place for the Martian winter.

Opportunity landed in Eagle Crater on Mars on Jan. 25, 2004, Universal Time and EST (Jan. 24, PST), three weeks after its rover twin, Spirit, landed halfway around the planet. In backyard-size Eagle Crater, Opportunity found evidence of an ancient wet environment. The mission met all its goals within the originally planned span of three months. During most of the next four years, it explored successively larger and deeper craters, adding evidence about wet and dry periods from the same era as the Eagle Crater deposits.

In mid-2008, researchers drove Opportunity out of Victoria Crater, half a mile (800 meters) in diameter, and set course for Endeavour Crater, 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter.

"Endeavour is a window further into Mars' past," said Mars Exploration Rover Program Manager John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

The trek took three years. In a push to finish it, Opportunity drove farther during its eighth year on Mars -- 4.8 miles (7.7 kilometers) -- than in any prior year, bringing its total driving distance to 21.4 miles (34.4 kilometers).

The "Cape York" segment of Endeavour's rim, where Opportunity has been working since August 2011, has already validated the choice of Endeavour as a long-term goal. "It's like starting a new mission, and we hit pay dirt right out of the gate," Callas said.

The first outcrop that Opportunity examined on Cape York differs from any the rover had seen previously. Its high zinc content suggests effects of water. Weeks later, at the edge of Cape York, a bright mineral vein identified as hydrated calcium sulfate provided what the mission's principal investigator, Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., calls "the clearest evidence for liquid water on Mars that we have found in our eight years on the planet."

Mars years last nearly twice as long as Earth years. Entering its ninth Earth year on Mars, Opportunity is also heading into its fifth Martian winter. Its solar panels have accumulated so much dust since Martian winds last cleaned them -- more than in previous winters -- the rover needs to stay on a sun-facing slope to have enough energy to keep active through the winter.

The rover team has not had to use this strategy with Opportunity in past winters, though it did so with Spirit, farther from the equator, for the three Martian winters that Spirit survived. By the beginning of the rovers' fourth Martian winter, drive motors in two of Spirit's six wheels had ceased working, long past their design lifespan. The impaired mobility kept the rover from maneuvering to an energy-favorable slope. Spirit stopped communicating in March 2010.

All six of Opportunity's wheels are still useful for driving, but the rover will stay on an outcrop called "Greeley Haven" until mid-2012 to take advantage of the outcrop's favorable slope and targets of scientific interest during the Martian winter. After the winter, or earlier if wind cleans dust off the solar panels, researchers plan to drive Opportunity in search of clay minerals that a Mars orbiter's observations indicate lie on Endeavour's rim.

"The top priority at Greeley Haven is the radio-science campaign to provide information about Mars' interior," said JPL's Diana Blaney, deputy project scientist for the mission. This study uses weeks of tracking radio signals from the stationary rover to measure wobble in the planet's rotation. The amount of wobble is an indicator of whether the core of the planet is molten, similar to the way spinning an egg can be used to determine whether it is raw or hard-boiled.

Other research at Greeley Haven includes long-term data gathering to investigate mineral ingredients of the outcrop with spectrometers on Opportunity's arm, and repeated observations to monitor wind-caused changes at various scales.

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[kennegun]

Reason No. 192465084828278940839488830332 why science should be taught instead of religion.

[viicISrotcib]

@ValmisFilm its called admitting your errors and changing your mind when the evidence proves you wrong. The real strength of science. Something religion refuses to have.

[viicISrotcib]

@55metalmonkey if religion did not change with the times everyone would abandon it, but they are the last ones to change and they keep humanity back all for what can only be considered adult fairy tales.

[55metalmonkey]

@viicISrotcib Religion does admit their errors (sometimes) The Vatican admitted that Galileo was right about the earth revolving around the sun.... it took 359 years and they denied it up until 1992 but thanks to the Vatican the earth now revolves around the sun:)

[Gravolux]

Of course, there are a bunch of people bickering over religion...

[spontaneoussam2]

i like pie

[wardog1967]

@iamabigfatbutt I agree, but to the NASA JPL engineers, that half a pound or even the construct of this device may be more than what they allow for (for whatever reason) in their designs. Seriously, I think it should have one too - no argument there. By the way...your name cracks me up! LOL!

[djay00009]

@WrathToCome Have you considered what Quantum theory suggests ? It does say that matter behaves both as a wave and a particle , Light behaves that way too , In that light can exist in many places at once, So if the matter in our universe behaves the same way as light , you and me, we must exist at many places at once ^^ might even be other universe , God is a very small concept given to such a complex universe , I believe its impossible for God to exist....literally Impossible

[djay00009]

@WrathToCome I will God cannot exist , Have u ever considered how everything in our life braks aparts,then joins back, breaks apart and joins back,This process is everywhere in the ecosystem, its in the thermal nature of plates of the planet Earth,in the death and creation of stars and Galaxies , The creation of beginnings and ending and them being repeated,If u try to analyze the universe in a mathematic equation , what you will end up with is Infinity ,Time is infinity , So are you

[djay00009]

@WrathToCome there is , time always exists , matter does not, well , consider different kinds of matter , anti matter , dark matter etc , or sub matter quarks , they are not matter , are they ? so even vacumm might not be just vacumm , it might be something more,what yu consider nothing is always something , Its dimensions , n as for me,i probably exist somewhere else too,apart from my current self and i will probably exist always,since time and matter generally behave the same way

[WrathToCome]

@djay00009

So you believe that spacetime has always existed and had no beginning. If time is infinite in its past then how did we manage to get to the present? You don't necessarily believe that matter existed before the bang, so I'm assuming you believe that matter came from nothing. Is there any logic or reason in your thinking? "How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge?" Proverbs 1:22