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| "Opportunity" relishes being on the world stage as it extends its run on Mars to 10 years. |
WHO WOULD HAVE BELIEVED?--GUEST BLOG—By Dr. Tony
Phillips, Science@NASA.gov--When
NASA's Mars rover Opportunity blasted off from Cape Canaveral in 2003, many
onlookers expected a relatively short mission.
Landing on Mars is risky business. The Red Planet has a long history of
destroying spacecraft that attempt to visit it.
Even if Opportunity did land safely, it was only designed for a 3-month
mission on the hostile Martian surface.
Few, if any, imagined that
Opportunity would still be roving the red sands of Mars--and still making
discoveries--ten years later. This summer (July 7, 2013), Opportunity celebrated
the 10th anniversary of its launch and more than 9 years on Mars.
Opportunity is celebrating
by driving. The rover is currently en
route to "Solander Point," a place on the rim of Endurance Crater
where a treasure-trove of geological layers is exposed for investigation.
After nine-plus years of
traveling, Opportunity recently set the US space program's all-time record for
mileage on another planet. The milestone
occurred on May 15, 2013, when the rover drove 80 meters, bringing its total
odometry 35.760 kilometers or 22.220 miles.
The previous mark had been
held by the Apollo 17 moon rover, which astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison
Schmitt drove for 35.74 km (22.21 miles) across the lunar surface in December
1972.
Over the years,
Opportunity's travels have been punctuated by hundreds of stops to photograph
and sample the Martian landscape. The surface
of Mars of today is bone dry and hostile to life as we know it. Opportunity's mission is to hunt for places
where it wasn't always so, places where ancient water might have nourished life
forms native to Mars.
So far so good; the rover
has found abundant evidence that liquid water was once present. For the past 20 months, Opportunity has been
"working" the rim of Endeavour Crater. There, Opportunity found
deposits of gypsum probably formed from groundwater seeping up through cracks
in Martian soil. Also, Opportunity has
also found signs of clay minerals in a rock named "Esperance".
"A lot of water moved
through this rock," says Steve Squyres of Cornell University, principal
investigator for the mission. "These results are some of the most important
findings of our entire mission."
Solander Point, where
Opportunity is heading now, has two key attractions:
For one thing, while
Opportunity's most recent stop, Cape York, exposed just a few meters of
geological layering, Solander Point exposes roughly 10 times as much. A visit
to Solander Point will be like reading a Martian history book.
Second, and perhaps more
importantly, there are north-facing slopes at Solander Point where the rover
can tilt its solar panels toward the sun and ride out the coming winter. The
minimum-sunshine days of this sixth Martian winter for Opportunity will come in
February 2014.
If Opportunity survives
another year--and who now would bet against it?--the rover might yet break the
all-time extraterrestrial driving record set by Lunokhod 2, a Soviet robotic
vehicle that traveled an estimated 26 miles (42 km) across the Moon in 1973.
After that lies the 26.2
mile mark. In other words, stay tuned
for the first Martian Marathon.
To follow Opportunity and other rovers on Mars, link
to: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/
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