NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover – Opportunity – is busy at work at the edge of “Santa Maria” crater, surveying the diverse textures of the geological feature.
Recent imagery shows the rover making use of its instrument-laden robotic arm to inspect a targeted rock – even while it’s out of contact with Earth controllers. In use is the robot’s Mössbauer Spectrometer.
Many of the minerals that formed rocks on Mars contain iron, and the soil is iron-rich. The Mössbauer Spectrometer is an instrument that was specially designed to study iron-bearing minerals.
For Opportunity, everything is on hold now since the red planet is in conjunction on the other side of the Sun, “so we effectively can’t communicate with the rover for a few weeks,” said Bill Farrand, a research scientist with the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
A Mars rover science team member, Farrand told this Coalition reporter: “We set Opportunity up to do a long Mössbauer Spectrometer integration on the light-toned rock target – ‘Luis de Torres’ — on the rim of the crater Santa Maria.”
Farrand said that the rover science team has been naming targets after members of Columbus’ crew on the Santa Maria.
In order to get decent signal-to-noise information from the Mössbauer now, Farrand added, it takes orders of magnitude longer integration times. “So being able to let it work during conjunction will give us a good measurement on that rock.”
After conjunction, there is discussion that other on-the-spot studies of some darker-toned rocks strewn around the outer rim of the crater may be carried out by Opportunity.
“These rocks have different color and textural properties from the lighter-toned rocks which make up most of the rim and might represent a deeper layer,” Farrand added.
The rover’s position is close to the crater’s lip on the southeastern edge of the crater. Santa Maria is about 295 feet (90 meters) in diameter.
By Leonard David
