NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover is busy examining Santa Maria crater within Meridiani Planum.
The wheeled robot is inspecting the relatively fresh and large crater that’s about 312 feet (95 meters) in diameter.
“We’ve been doing a lot of imaging of it from a set of points around the rim so that we can use the stereo Pancam imagery to make a very high resolution three dimensional digital terrain model of the crater,” said William Farrand, a Mars rover science team member and Senior Research Scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
Opportunity’s Pancam is a high-resolution stereo camera that takes color pictures of the surrounding Martian landscape from the rover.
Farrand told this Coalition reporter that scientists are hoping to carry out on-the-spot chemical measurements on outcrop exposures on the southeast rim of the crater. Doing so — at this fresh and recently excavated crater — may reveal some previously unsampled layer in the Meridiani Planum stratigraphy.
“This should help with the understanding of how craters are formed and modified on Mars in general and Meridiani Planum in particular,” Farrand said.
By Leonard David