'Opportunity' is still hard at work!

There's some good news from Mars. It's amazing, not in the sense that one of the Mars Exploration Rovers is active, but that it's still active after eight years. Remember, it was designed for a mission originally scheduled to last for only 90 Martian days!

The Planetary Society reports:

The Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission emerged from its third solar conjunction this month and, as March roars in, is embarking on its 86th month on the Red Planet. While Opportunity roved away from a surface target it had been studying at Santa Maria Crater and on to an intriguing blue boulder, JPL engineers on Earth stepped up their efforts to recover Spirit, which has been silent, ostensibly in hibernation mode, since late March, nearly one year ago.

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... Opportunity emerged from solar conjunction in fine form. The rover promptly returned a healthy amount of data on Luis de Torres, a surface target named for one of Christopher Columbus' crewmembers on the first voyage of his Santa Maria. This Luis de Torres is located along the wall of the southeast rim, on the edge of what may be a shallow secondary impact depression the team calls Yuma.

This area was chosen for Opportunity to hunker down and work during the two-week solar conjunction period, because it was a safe location and because it is in the area where the signature for hydrated sulfate, a mineral that indicates past water, was detected from orbit by the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), a visible-infrared spectrometer onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

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Last week, Opportunity roved northeast from Luis de Torres, driving counter-clockwise around Santa Maria Crater to Ruiz Garcia, a slate-blue colored boulder that it has since been examining.

The boulder christened 'Ruiz Garcia', photographed by the Opportunity rover

This rock was also named after one of Columbus' crewmembers from the Santa Maria's first voyage, and the rover is now finishing up its check-out of this interesting, equant rock. From Ruiz Garcia, the plans calls for Opportunity to drive another 20 to 30 meters further to the northeast to a chosen waypoint, where it will take some final stereo images of the interior of the crater. The scientists hope to combine all the stereo images the rover took here and create a 3-D map of Santa Maria. "Then we'll start heading for the hills," said Arvidson.

Although the winds of the late Martian spring are kicking up dust and causing extremely dusty, almost opaque skies over the Opportunity's site, it's what usually happens this time of year and the team is not worried.

"The atmospheric opacity has been moving up and down because of the season," confirmed Arvidson. And even though Opportunity's power levels have dropped, the rover, he added, "still has an abundance of power to do what we need to do."

Although there are no compelling targets between Santa Maria and the 22-kilometer (13.70-mile) diameter Endeavour Crater from what can be seen in the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) pictures taken from MRO's orbit, Opportunity, in addition to necessary rest stops, will be making at least a couple of stops en route to take samples of the bedrock and soils.

If something interesting or odd or different should be found on the route, the team will instruct Opportunity stop and take a look. "We're a discovery led mission," reminded Callas. "We'll drive for Endeavour, and if we see compelling science along the way, we'll stop of course, but really the plan is to get where we need to go. So, once we're done at Santa Maria, it will be time to get back up on the Interstate and put the pedal to the metal."

There's more at the link.

Congratulations to the project team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for their hard work in keeping the Mars rovers going, so far beyond their design lifetime. We're learning more through these vehicles and their instruments than anyone would have believed possible, eight years ago.

Peter