Mars Rover Opportunity Reaches Campsite for Martian Winter

NASA's Opportunity Mars rover used its navigation camera to record this image of the northern end of "Solander Point," a raised section of the western rim of Endeavour Crater, on Aug. 8, 2013.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's long-lived Opportunity Mars rover has reached the site where it will wait out its sixth Red Planet winter.

Opportunity — which touched down on Mars in January 2004 just after its twin, Spirit, arrived on the planet — is studying rocks at the foot of a location called Solander Point, whose north-facing slope will allow the robot to tilt its solar panels toward the sun during the coming southern Martian winter.

"We made it," Opportunity project scientist Matt Golombek, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement. "The drives went well, and Opportunity is right next to Solander Point."

"We know we could be on that north-facing slope with a one-day drive, but we don't need to go there yet. We have time to investigate the contact between the two geological units around the base of Solander Point."



One of those two units preserves evidence of long-ago contact with acidic water, while the other one is older and may contain minerals that formed in more neutral and benign liquid water, researchers said.

The Opportunity rover arrived at the base of Solander Point in the first few days of August, after a three-month, 1.5-mile (2.4 kilometers) journey from a spot called Cape York.

Both Solander Point and Cape York sit along the rim of the 14-mile-wide (22 km) Endeavour Crater, which Opportunity reached in August 2011.

The days are getting shorter in Mars' southern hemisphere, and the amount of sunlight available to the solar-powered Opportunity will reach a minimum in mid-February 2014 (the southern winter solstice occurs on Feb. 14).