NASA Mars Rover Opportunity: Rover finishes walkabout on crater rim

This map shows the route driven by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity during a reconnaissance circuit around an area of interest called "Matijevic Hill" on the rim of a large crater.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

The latest work assignment for NASA's long-lived Mars rover Opportunity is a further examination of an area where the robot just completed a walkabout.

"If you are a geologist studying a site like this, one of the first things you do is walk the outcrop, and that's what we've done with Opportunity," said Steve Squyres, the mission's principal investigator at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

Coming up on its ninth anniversary, Opportunity still is a capable robotic explorer. It has been investigating a crater-rim site where observations from orbiting Mars spacecraft detected traces of clay minerals, which form under wet, non-acidic conditions that can be favorable for life.

The rover's current activities were presented at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. The rover team chose this site as a driving destination years earlier.

The site is named Matijevic Hill in honour of the late Jacob Matijevic, who led the engineering team for the twin Mars exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity for several years.

Opportunity drove about 1,160 feet (354 meters) in a counterclockwise circuit around Matijevic Hill in October and November, bringing the total miles driven on the mission to 22 miles (35.4 kilometers).

Researchers used the rover to survey the extent of Matijevic Hill outcrops and identify the best places to investigate further. "We've got a list of questions posed by the observations so far," Squyres said.

"We did this walkabout to determine the most efficient use of time to answer the questions. Now we have a good idea what we're dealing with, and we're ready to start the detailed work."

The hill is on the western rim of Endeavour Crater, a bowl 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter. An impact from a celestial object dug this crater more than 3 billion years ago, pushing rocks onto the rim from a greater depth than Opportunity reached during its first several years on Mars.

Since the impact, those rocks may have been altered by environmental conditions. Sorting out the relative ages of local outcrops is a key to understanding the area's environmental history.

"Almost nine years into a mission planned to last for three months, Opportunity is fit and ready for driving, robotic-arm operations and communication with Earth," said the mission's deputy project scientist, Diana Blaney, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Two outcrops of high interest on Matijevic Hill are "Whitewater Lake" and "Kirkwood." Whitewater Lake is light-toned material that science team members believe may contain clay.

Kirkwood contains small spheres with composition, structure and distribution that differ from other iron-rich spherules, nicknamed blueberries, that Opportunity found at its landing site and throughout the Meridiani Planum area it has explored. Squyres calls the Kirkwood spheres "newberries."

"We don't know yet whether Whitewood Lake and Kirkwood are from before or after the crater formed," he said.

"One of the most important things to work out is the order and position of the rock layers to tell us the relative ages. We also need more work on the composition of Whitewater and debris shed by Whitewater to understand the clay signature seen from orbit, and on the composition of the newberries to understand how they formed."

NASA Mars Rover Curiosity: NavCam's 3D Images

This picture is the first full-resolution 3D image from the navigational cameras on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, taken shortly after the robot had lifted up its mast on sol 2 of its 98-week mission (a sol is a Martian solar day, which lasts for 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35.244 seconds).

The view shows a pebble-strewn surface with the mountainous rim of Gale crater rising in the distance.

To create the eye-popping shot, NASA combined newly received data from the rover's twin navcams, which sit on the remote-sensing mast's WALL-E-like head.

These cameras act like left and right eyes for capturing stereo views of the Martian landscape (see images below).

The navcams can see out to 100 metres and will be used not only to plan the rover's path forward but also for deciding where to aim the MastCam and ChemCam.

MastCam can take colour pictures, video and stitched panoramas, while ChemCam will fire a laser from up to 7 metres away to vaporise rocks and analyse their composition via spectroscopy.

Once the team completes calibrating the cameras, they'll instruct the navcams to take a 360-degree panorama, helping rover drivers get a good hard look at the landing site before driving off toward their main science target, the intriguing mountain inside Gale named Mount Sharp.

NASA MARS Rover Curiosity NavCams: First 360-Degree Panorama

Remarkable image sets from NASA's Curiosity rover and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are continuing to develop the story of Curiosity's landing and first days on Mars.

The images from Curiosity's just-activated navigation cameras, or Navcams, include the rover's first self-portrait, looking down at its deck from above.

Another Navcam image set, in lower-resolution thumbnails, is the first 360-degree view of Curiosity's new home in Gale Crater.

Also downlinked were two, higher-resolution Navcams providing the most detailed depiction to date of the surface adjacent to the rover.

"These Navcam images indicate that our powered descent stage did more than give us a great ride, it gave our science team an amazing freebie," said John Grotzinger, project scientist for the mission from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

"The thrust from the rockets actually dug a one-and-a-half-foot-long [0.5-meter] trench in the surface. It appears we can see Martian bedrock on the bottom. Its depth below the surface is valuable data we can use going forward."

Another image set, courtesy of the Context Camera, or CTX, aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has pinpointed the final resting spots of the six, 55-pound (25-kilogram) entry ballast masses.

The tungsten masses impacted the Martian surface at a high speed of about 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) from Curiosity's landing location.

Curiosity's latest images are available

NASA Mars Rover Curiosity's New Home: Panoramic Picture

These are the first two full-resolution images of the Martian surface from the Navigation cameras on NASA's Curiosity rover, which are located on the rover's "head" or mast.

The rim of Gale Crater can be seen in the distance beyond the pebbly ground.

The topography of the rim is very mountainous due to erosion.

The ground seen in the middle shows low-relief scarps and plains.

The foreground shows two distinct zones of excavation likely carved out by blasts from the rover's descent stage thrusters.

These are full-resolution images, 1024 by 1024 pixels in size.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA Mars Rover Curiosity: Images of Mount Sharp and Gale Crater Rim

The Mars Science Laboratory, better known as Curiosity, has sent back its first color photo from the Red Planet.

Curiosity snapped this photo showing the rim of the Gale Crater, the 96-mile-wide formation where it touched down early Monday morning.

Curiosity took the photo with a camera called the Mars Hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI. MAHLI's main function is to take high-resolution photos of rocks and soil, but as shown here, it has other applications as well.

"The image is murky because the MAHLI's removable dust cover is apparently coated with dust that was blown onto the camera during the rover's terminal descent," NASA said.

"Images taken without the dust cover in place are expected during checkout of the robotic arm in coming weeks.

The rover also took this photo of Mount Sharp, also known as Aeolis Mons. Curiosity is scheduled to explore the three-mile-high mountain on its two-year search for signs that Mars once supported life.