NASA’s senior Mars rover takes on new challenge. Where is Opportunity heading
Landing on Mars in 2004, the rover Opportunity is NASA’s ‘senior.’ Now, the rover has left behind “Cape Tribulation,” a crater-rim segment it has explored since late 2014, and will observe the “Perseverance Valley,” looking for clues into the valley’s formation.
Before leaving “Cape Tribulation,” where it spent the past 30 months, Opportunity captured a series of images and the rover team assembled them to form a panorama of a ridge called “Rocheport”.
According to NASA, the rover team plans observations in the Perseverance Valley to determine what type of fluid activity carved it billions of years ago: water, wind, or flowing debris lubricated by water.
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Perseverance Valley is about two football fields long. It cuts downward west to east across the western rim of Endeavour Crater. The crater is about 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter, with a segmented rim that exposes the oldest rocks ever investigated in place on Mars. Opportunity has less than four football fields’ distance of driving to reach the top of the valley after departing Cape Tribulation, a raised segment about 3 miles (5 kilometers) long on the crater’s western rim.
“The degree of erosion at Rocheport is fascinating. Grooves run perpendicular to the crest line. They may have been carved by water or ice or wind. We want to see as many features like this on the way to Perseverance Valley as we can, for comparison with what we find there,” Opportunity Deputy Principal Investigator Ray Arvidson, of Washington University in St. Louis, said.
Now more than 13 years into a mission originally scheduled to last three months on Mars, Opportunity remains unexpectedly capable of continued exploration. It has driven about four-tenths of a mile (two-thirds of a kilometer) since the start of 2017, bringing the total traverse so far to 27.6 miles (44.4 kilometers).
The current season on Mars is past the period when global dust storms might arise and curtail Opportunity’s solar power.
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