Mars Rover Passes 20-Km. Marker

The NASA rover Opportunity has passed the 20-kilometer (12.43 mile) mark on its marathon Mars mission.

Opportunity hit the driving milestone this week as it headed toward its next destination, Endeavour crater.

Since landing in 2004, Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, have outlasted their original three-month mission, and are now in their seventh year of exploration.

Opportunity departed its last major focus of observation, Concepcion Crater, on March 9, and has driven 2,014 feet farther along the route to its long-term destination at Endeavour.

The aging rover still has another 7.2 miles to go to reach Endeavour.

Squyres said, "We're on the road again," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, the principal investigator for Opportunity and its twin, Spirit. "We have a healthy rover and we have enough power for substantial drives."

Opportunity has examined a series of craters on the plain of Meridiani, and has taken more than 133,000 images. Recent images toward the southwest show the rim of a crater named Bopolu, about 40 miles away.

New software uploaded to Opportunity, called Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science (or AEGIS), allows the rover to target specific points with its camera for closer examination, without waiting for Earthbound scientists to choose new destinations from wide-angle images and then direct the rover there.

Other software upgrades improved the rover's capability to choose a route around obstacles and calculate how far to reach out a rover's arm to touch a rock.

Unlike Opportunity, Spirit is stuck in a sand trap, and has been transitioned to a "Stationary Research Platform," studying tiny variations in the rotation of Mars (to gain insight about the planet's core), variations in the composition of nearby soil, and monitoring the Martian atmosphere.

"Spirit is not dead; it has just entered another phase of its long life," said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Its power has been declining with the coming winter, and it's expected to go into hibernation mode.

Before it became stuck, Spirit had logged nearly 5 miles on its odometer.


For more info:
Mars Exploration Rover Mission (NASA.gov)

[Overruled1]

As I see it, we need to know what resources private industry would want like valuable metals and mineral deposits so mines could be started and economic conditions could exist to make it worthwhile for anyone in the future to want to go to such places.
You realize that the valuable metals we on earth dig up are not made on earth right?
Therefore it stands to reason there must be some on other worlds nearby

[Overruled1]

As I see it, we need to know what resources private industry would want like valuable metals and mineral deposits so mines could be started and economic conditions could exist to make it worthwhile for anyone in the future to want to go to such places.
You realize that the valuable metals we on earth dig up are not made on earth right?
Therefore it stands to reason there must be some on other worlds nearby?

[bobnjersey]

[Since landing in 2004, Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, have outlasted their original three-month mission, and are now in their seventh year of exploration. ]

wow ... talk about margin in a design! kudos to all those at nasa that engineered this amazing piece of technology to move way beyond it's expected mission.

[run2jazz2]

I am a little skeptical about this? We created a ship to land a vehicle on another planet to take picutures and samples and this thing has not been recalled for anything. We ought to have NASA make cars instead of space ships.