Things are busy for NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover. It’s over half-way towards its next exploration site: Endeavor crater.
But sistership, Spirit, is the real problem child.
First, a status update on the healthy and rolling, rolling, rolling robot – Opportunity.
“We have made it through what we expect is the toughest driving challenges in terms of dunes that might have bogged us down,” said William Farrand, a senior research scientist for the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He is also a participating scientist on the long-lived Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.
Concerning Opportunity, Farrand told this Coalition report, from here on out, the driving is, for the most part, relatively flat and without major obstacles. “We are starting to get some great views of the rim of Endeavor,” he added.
Farrand said that the Mars rover is approaching a relatively fresh crater which
the rover team has informally named “Santa Maria”.
“We spent about 6 months exploring a similarly sized, but somewhat larger, crater, Endurance, earlier in the mission, but we will only be able to spend a few weeks at Santa Maria,” Farrand noted.
“There are some great outcrop exposures at Santa Maria and we are always on the lookout for the chance to sample new layers of the stratigraphy at Meridiani Planum,” Farrand added. “A relatively fresh crater such as Santa Maria could have excavated some previously unsampled layers. So the observations made at Santa Maria should be scientifically very interesting.”
Hope about Spirit – a great awakening?
Switching gears, literally and figuratively, what about Spirit, the other well-wheeled robot, but stuck in the sand at another spot on the red planet?
Spirit has been nearly stationary since April 2009.
Seemingly, bad news.
With the onset of the Martian winter, NASAs Spirit rover went into a low power fault mode, Farrand responded. “We haven’t heard anything since the time it went into that state so we don’t know anything about its current situation.”
Still, there’s hope about Spirit.
“The engineering models suggest that — as the Sun gets high enough in the sky — that Spirit might awaken. Since neither one of the rovers has been in this state before though we just don’t know for sure whether that will happen or not,” Farrand reported.
“The solar power and engineering models suggest that the earliest we could hear from Spirit would be sometime in the first half of 2011,” Farrand concluded.
Spirit and its twin, Opportunity, began exploring Mars in January 2004 on missions planned to last three months.
By Leonard David