NASA Mars Rover Opportunity: On West Rim Endeavour heading for Ulysses crater

NASA Mars Rover Opportunity is on the west rim of Endeavour Crater heading towards "Marathon Valley," a putative location for abundant clay minerals.

The rover is headed to a near-term target, a small crater named "Ulysses."

The rover is moving closer to Ulysses to get a peek inside.

Ulysses Crater

On Sol 3787 (Sept. 18, 2014), Opportunity drove a little over 44 feet (13.5 meters) in rocky terrain, requiring the use of Visual Odometry to safely navigate.

On Sol 3789 (Sept. 20, 2014), the rover moved closer to the rim of Ulysses, but the drive stopped after 15 feet (4.6 meters) because Visual Odometry was not tracking on the last steps.

An evening Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) measurement of atmospheric argon was performed on Sol 3790 (Sept. 21, 2014).

The rover continued closer to Ulysses on the next sol with a 13-feet (4-meter) bump.

High slip prevented the rover from completing the turn for communication at the end of the drive.

Recently, there were more Flash-related events. Two more "amnesia" events occurred on the evenings of Sols 3786 and 3789 (Sept. 17 and Sept. 20, 2014). And two Flash write errors to Bank 7 occurred on Sols 3791 and 3792 (Sept. 22 and Sept. 23, 2014).

All these events were benign and did not impact the rover's operation. The project continues to investigate. Otherwise, Opportunity continues in good health.

As of Sol 3792 (Sept. 23, 2014), the solar array energy production was 639 watt-hours with an atmospheric opacity (Tau) of 0.889 and a solar array dust factor of 0.740.

Total odometry is 25.34 (40.77 kilometers).

NASA Curiosity Rover: Long-lived rover sets off-world driving record

This natural colour view from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows "Lunokhod Crater," which lies south of Solander Point on the west rim of Endeavour Crater. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech /Cornell /Arizona State Univ.

NASA's Opportunity Mars rover, which landed on the Red Planet in 2004, now holds the off-Earth roving distance record after accruing 25 miles (40 kilometers) of driving.

The previous record was held by the Soviet Union's Lunokhod 2 rover.

"Opportunity has driven farther than any other wheeled vehicle on another world," said Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"This is so remarkable considering Opportunity was intended to drive about one kilometer and was never designed for distance but what is really important is not how many miles the rover has racked up, but how much exploration and discovery we have accomplished over that distance."

A drive of 157 feet (48 meters) on July 27 put Opportunity's total odometry at 25.01 miles (40.25 kilometers).

This month's driving brought the rover southward along the western rim of Endeavour Crater.

The rover had driven more than 20 miles (32 kilometers) before arriving at Endeavour Crater in 2011, where it has examined outcrops on the crater's rim containing clay and sulfate-bearing minerals.

The sites are yielding evidence of ancient environments with less acidic water than those examined at Opportunity's landing site.

If the rover can continue to operate the distance of a marathon, 26.2 miles (about 42.2 kilometers), it will approach the next major investigation site mission scientists have dubbed "Marathon Valley."

Observations from spacecraft orbiting Mars suggest several clay minerals are exposed close together at this valley site, surrounded by steep slopes where the relationships among different layers may be evident.

The Russian Lunokhod 2 rover, a successor to the first Lunokhod mission in 1970, landed on Earth's moon on Jan. 15, 1973, where it drove about 24.2 miles (39 kilometers) in less than five months, according to calculations recently made using images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) cameras that reveal Lunokhod 2's tracks.

Irina Karachevtseva at Moscow State University of Geodesy and Cartography's Extraterrestrial Laboratory in Russia, Brad Jolliff of Washington University in St. Louis, Tim Parker of JPL, and others collaborated to verify the map-based methods for computing distances are comparable for Lunokhod-2 and Opportunity.

This chart illustrates comparisons among the distances driven by various wheeled vehicles on the surface of Earth's moon and Mars. 

Of the vehicles shown, the NASA Mars rovers Opportunity and Curiosity are still active and the totals for those two are distances driven as of May 15, 2013.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

"The Lunokhod missions still stand as two signature accomplishments of what I think of as the first golden age of planetary exploration, the 1960s and '70s," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and principal investigator for NASA's twin Mars rovers, Opportunity and Spirit.

"We're in a second golden age now, and what we've tried to do on Mars with Spirit and Opportunity has been very much inspired by the accomplishments of the Lunokhod team on the moon so many years ago. It has been a real honour to follow in their historical wheel tracks."

As Opportunity neared the mileage record earlier this year, the rover team chose the name Lunokhod 2 for a crater about 20 feet (6 meters) in diameter on the outer slope of Endeavour's rim on Mars.

NASA Opportunity rover captures Martian vista from ridgeline

Credit: NASA /JPL-Caltech /Cornell Univ. /Arizona State Univ. Click on the image to view it full size.

The rim surrounding Endeavour Crater on Mars recedes southward, then sweeps around to the east in a vista obtained by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity.

The view is from high on the south end of the "Murray Ridge" portion of the crater's western rim.

The image was assembled from multiple exposures taken by Opportunity's panoramic camera (Pancam) in April. It shows locations along the rim that the rover has subsequently reached and may explore in the future.

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover spent several months exploring portions of Murray Ridge. Since reaching the local high point on the ridgeline from which this panorama was taken, the rover has proceeded southward to reach an exposure of aluminum-rich clay detected from orbit.

During Opportunity's first decade on Mars and the 2004-2010 career of its twin, Spirit, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Project yielded a range of findings proving wet environmental conditions on ancient Mars, some very acidic, others milder and more conducive to supporting life.

Opportunity's Tracks Near Crater Rim Ridgeline: The component images for this 360-degree panorama were taken by the navigation camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity after the rover drove about 97 feet (29.5 meters) during the mission's 3,642nd Martian day, or sol (April 22, 2014). Click on the image to view it full size.

The rover drove southwestward that sol, so the tracks from this end-of-drive position recede toward the northeast. 

For scale, the distance between the two parallel tracks is about 3.3 feet (1 meter). The position is just west of the ridgeline of the west rim of Endeavour Crater. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Approaching a Target Deposit on Mars Crater Rim: NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its navigation camera to capture the component images for this 360-degree view near the ridgeline of Endeavour Crater's western rim. Click on the image to view it full size.

The view is centered toward southeast, from the rover's position just west of the western rim's ridgeline on the mission's 3,659th Martian day, or sol (May 10, 2014). 

The western rim of the crater extends northward to the left and southward to the right. Endeavour Crater is about 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter. Its distant rim is visible on the horizon at center. 

The outcrop on the slope to the right of center corresponds to the northern end of an area where a concentration of aluminum-containing clay has been detected in observations by the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer (CRISM) on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. 

That detection from orbit made the outcrop a favored target for investigation by Opportunity. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Endeavour Crater Rim From 'Murray Ridge' on Mars, False Colour. Click on the image to view it full size.

Credit: NASA /JPL-Caltech /Cornell Univ. /Arizona State Univ.

More information: The panorama is available online: www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/

Shadow Portrait of NASA Rover Opportunity on Martian Slope

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity caught its own silhouette in this late-afternoon image taken by the rover's rear hazard avoidance camera. 

This camera is mounted low on the rover and has a wide-angle lens.

The image was taken looking eastward shortly before sunset on the 3,609th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity's work on Mars (March 20, 2014).

The rover's shadow falls across a slope called the McClure-Beverlin Escarpment on the western rim of Endeavour Crater, where Opportunity is investigating rock layers for evidence about ancient environments.

The scene includes a glimpse into the distance across the 14-mile-wide (22-kilometer-wide) crater.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA Mars orbiter HiRise Image: Opportunity Rover on Murray Ridge

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

A new image from a telescopic camera orbiting Mars shows NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity at work on "Murray Ridge," without any new impact craters nearby.

The Feb. 14 view from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is above.

Rover tracks from Opportunity, as well as the rover itself, are visible.

A rock, dubbed "Pinnacle Island," appeared in January 2014 next to Opportunity where it had been absent a few days earlier.

After that, researchers using HiRISE planned this observation to check the remote possibility that a fresh impact by an object from space might have excavated a crater near Opportunity and thrown this rock to its new location. No fresh impact site is seen in the image.

Meanwhile, observations by the rover solved the Pinnacle Island mystery by finding where the rock had been struck, broken and moved by a rover wheel.

Murray Ridge is part of the western rim of Endeavour Crater, an impact scar that is billions of years old and about 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter.

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).

NASA Curiosity Rover Finds New Evidence That Ancient Mars Was Habitable

The pale rock in the upper center of this image, about the size of a human forearm, includes a target called "Esperance," which was inspected by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity.

This image is a composite of three exposures taken by Opportunity's panoramic camera during the 3,262nd Martian day, or sol, of the rover's work on Mars (March 28, 2013).

CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.

NASA's Mars rover Opportunity has made perhaps the biggest discovery of its nearly 10-year career, finding evidence that life may have been able to get a foothold on the Red Planet long ago.

The Opportunity rover spotted clay minerals in an ancient rock on the rim of Mars' Endeavour Crater, suggesting that benign, neutral-pH water once flowed through the area, scientists said.

"This is water you could drink," Opportunity principal investigator Steve Squyres of Cornell University told reporters today (June 7), explaining why the rock, dubbed "Esperance," stands out from other water-soaked stones the rover has studied.

"This is water that was probably much more favorable in its chemistry, in its pH, in its level of acidity, for things like prebiotic chemistry — the kind of chemistry that could lead to the origin of life," Squyres added.

NASA Mars Rover Opportunity examines clay clues in rock Esperance

The pale rock in the upper center of this image, about the size of a human forearm, includes a target called "Esperance," which was inspected by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity.

Data from the rover's Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) indicate that Esperance's composition is higher in aluminum and silica, and lower in calcium and iron, than other rocks Opportunity has examined in more than nine years on Mars.

Preliminary interpretation points to clay mineral content due to intensive alteration by water. 

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.

NASA's senior Mars rover, Opportunity, is driving to a new study area after a dramatic finish to 20 months on "Cape York" with examination of a rock intensely altered by water.

The fractured rock, called "Esperance," provides evidence about a wet ancient environment possibly favorable for life.

Steve Squyres

The mission's principal investigator, Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., said, "Esperance was so important, we committed several weeks to getting this one measurement of it, even though we knew the clock was ticking."

The mission's engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., had set this week as a deadline for starting a drive toward "Solander Point," where the team plans to keep Opportunity working during its next Martian winter.

"What's so special about Esperance is that there was enough water not only for reactions that produced clay minerals, but also enough to flush out ions set loose by those reactions, so that Opportunity can clearly see the alteration," said Scott McLennan of the State University of New York, Stony Brook, a long-term planner for Opportunity's science team.

This map of a portion of the western rim of Endeavour Crater on Mars shows the area where NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity worked for 20 months, "Cape York," in relation to the area where the rover team plans for Opportunity to spend its sixth Martian winter, "Solander Point."

This rock's composition is unlike any other Opportunity has investigated during nine years on Mars—higher in aluminum and silica, lower in calcium and iron.

The next destination, Solander Point, and the area Opportunity is leaving, Cape York, both are segments of the rim of Endeavour Crater, which spans 14 miles (22 kilometers) across.

The planned driving route to Solander Point is about 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers).

Cape York has been Opportunity's home since the rover arrived at the western edge of Endeavour in mid-2011 after a two-year trek from a smaller crater.

"Based on our current solar-array dust models, we intend to reach an area of 15 degrees northerly tilt before Opportunity's sixth Martian winter," said JPL's Scott Lever, mission manager.

Scott McLennan

"Solander Point gives us that tilt and may allow us to move around quite a bit for winter science observations."

Northerly tilt increases output from the rover's solar panels during southern-hemisphere winter.

Daily sunshine for Opportunity will reach winter minimum in February 2014. The rover needs to be on a favourable slope well before then.

This mosaic of four frames shot by the microscopic imager on the robotic arm of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows a rock target called "Esperance" after some of the rock's surface had been removed by Opportunity's rock abrasion tool, or RAT. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech /Cornell /USGS

The first drive away from Esperance covered 81.7 feet (24.9 meters) on May 14.

Three days earlier, Opportunity finished exposing a patch of the rock's interior with the rock abrasion tool.

The team used a camera and spectrometer on the robotic arm to examine Esperance.

JPL's Scott Lever, mission manager

The team identified Esperance while exploring a portion of Cape York where the Compact Reconnaissance Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) had detected a clay mineral.

Clays typically form in wet environments that are not harshly acidic.

For years, Opportunity had been finding evidence for ancient wet environments that were very acidic.

The CRISM findings prompted the rover team to investigate the area where clay had been detected from orbit.

There, they found an outcrop called "Whitewater Lake," containing a small amount of clay from alteration by exposure to water.

"There appears to have been extensive, but weak, alteration of Whitewater Lake, but intense alteration of Esperance along fractures that provided conduits for fluid flow," Squyres said.

"Water that moved through fractures during this rock's history would have provided more favourable conditions for biology than any other wet environment recorded in rocks Opportunity has seen."

NASA Mars Rovers: Opportunity Continues to Cover New Ground

While many obsessed over speculation that NASA’s newest Mars rover, Curiosity, had dug up signs of life, but it had not, it is the agency’s older, smaller jalopy, Opportunity, that has been exploring a more intriguing plot of Martian real estate. 

“This is our first glimpse ever at conditions on ancient Mars that clearly show us a chemistry that would have been suitable for life,” Steven W. Squyres, the principal investigator for Opportunity, said at a news conference last week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. 

Opportunity could be sitting on rocks chock-full of organic molecules but the rover and the scientists back on Earth would never know. Unlike Curiosity, Opportunity is not carrying instruments that can detect those kinds of molecules. 

But the scientists are not complaining. Everything from Opportunity over the past eight years has been a bonus for a mission that was to have ended long ago. 

Opportunity landed on Mars in January 2004, for what was supposed to be a three-month mission. Yet the rover continues operating in good condition. 

Its twin rover, Spirit, died in 2010, stuck in a sand trap and unable to point its solar arrays in the correct direction to survive winter, outliving its planned lifetime by almost six years.

Last year, Opportunity arrived at a 14-mile-wide crater named Endeavour, where NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted clays from above. Clays generally form in the presence of water.

On Sol 3146 (Nov. 29, 2012), Opportunity using the Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) performed a grind of the surface target "Sandcherry."

This was followed with an image mosaic collected by the Microscopic Imager (MI) and then a placement of the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) for an overnight integration. 

On Sol 3151 (Dec. 4, 2012), the rover moved just 9 inches (23 centimeters) to reach some new surface targets.

The clay signal pointed to a hill, which the scientists named after Jacob Matijevic, an engineer on the rover team who died this year.

As Opportunity approached, “We started seeing things that looked really, really different,” Dr. Squyres said. 

The most common rock there was light-coloured, fine-grained, very soft, and nothing like any that Opportunity had come across before.

“It is right in the sweet spot of where the clay signature is present,” Dr. Squyres said. “It has got to be the clay-bearing stuff.”

But when the rover looked at the elements in the rock, it was the same mix of elements in a typical Martian rock. “What’s unusual is that it’s not unusual,” Dr. Squyres said. “This puzzled us at first. I was expecting something dramatic and instead what you see here kind of looks like average Mars.”

Another instrument could have identified minerals in the rock, but the radioactive cobalt it relies on has long decayed away.

If Curiosity were at the Endeavour crater, its instruments could directly look for the carbon-based molecules known as organics that are the building blocks of life. 

Unfortunately, Curiosity, which landed in August, is more than 5,000 miles away exploring a different crater where clays have also been spotted from orbit  and it is still months away from reaching Matijevic.