Mars Rover Heading Toward Bigger Crater

September 25, 2008 — It’s an opportunity NASA couldn’t pass up. That’s why NASA’s Mars rover, appropriately called Opportunity, is setting its sights on a crater more than 20 times larger than its home for the past two years. To reach the crater the team calls Endeavour, Opportunity will need to drive 7 miles, or about the total distance it has traveled since landing on Mars in early 2004. It isn’t going to be a quick drive. The rover team estimates Opportunity will travel about 110 yards each day, meaning the journey could take two years. "We may not get there, but it is scientifically the right direction to go anyway," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, principal investigator for the science instruments on Opportunity and its twin rover, Spirit. "This crater is staggeringly large compared to anything we've seen before." Getting there would yield a look inside a bowl 13.7 miles across. Scientists expect to see a much deeper stack of rock layers than those examined in Victoria Crater, where the rover climbed out of earlier this month. "I would love to see that view from the rim," Squyres said. "But even if we never get there, as we move southward we expect to be getting to younger and younger layers of rock on the surface.” Opportunity, like Spirit, is well past its expected lifetime on Mars, and might not keep working long enough to reach the crater. However, two new resources not available during the 4-mile drive toward Victoria Crater in 2005 and 2006 are expected to aid in this new trek. One is imaging from orbit of details smaller than the rover itself, using a high-resolution camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which arrived at Mars in 2006. The camera will allow the crew to identify drive paths and potential hazards along the route. Other advantages come from a new version of flight software uplinked to the twin rovers in 2006, boosting their ability to autonomously choose routes and avoid hazards such as sand dunes. During its first year on Mars, Opportunity found geological evidence that the area where it landed had surface and underground water in the distant past. The rover's explorations since have added information about how that environment changed over time.		This photo from the THEMIS thermal imager on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter shows Endurance and Victoria craters, which already have been explored by the Opportunity rover, as well as the much larger Endeavour Crater. Image credit: NASA/JPL/ASU

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