From MSNBC
NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity has found a Martian rock covered in weird material as its odometer hit a major milestone this week, with the long-lived robot completing equivalent to a half-marathon on the Red Planet.
Opportunity, now in its seventh year on Mars, found the odd Mars rock during the past six weeks studying investigating a crater called “Concepción.”
The crater is about 33 feet (10 meters) in diameter, with dark rays extending from it, as seen from orbit, which made it a target of interest for rover inspection because they suggest the crater is young.
The rover made the pit stop to investigate the crater on its long journey to the large crater Endeavour, which is still about 7 miles (12 kilometers) away. It was while Opportunity was at Concepción that the rover surpassed 12.43 miles (20 kilometers) of total driving, about the length of a half-marathon.
Opportunity has driven farther than any other wheeled robot to land on Mars. Its robotic twin Spirit, which landed in January 2004 just weeks ahead of Opportunity, has driven about 4.8 miles (7.7 kilometers), while NASA’s Sojourner rover, a small robot that landed in 1997, could drive only about a third of a mile (about half a kilometer) from the Pathfinder base it landed with.
Mars rock oddity
With new software that allows Opportunity to photograph rocks and other aspects of the Martian terrain and decide for itself what is worth closer inspection, the rover took an up-close look at a few rocks ejected by the impact that created Concepción.
What Opportunity has seen are chunks of the same type of bedrock it has seen at hundreds of locations since landing in January 2004: soft, sulfate-rich sandstone holding harder peppercorn-size dark spheres like berries in a muffin. The little spheres, rich in iron, gained the nickname “blueberries.” But these rocks have some unusual twists as well.
“It was clear from the images that Opportunity took on the approach to Concepción that there was strange stuff on lots of the rocks near the crater,” said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, principal investigator for Opportunity and Spirit. “There’s dark, grayish material coating faces of the rocks and filling fractures in them. At least part of it is composed of blueberries jammed together as close as you could pack them. We’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Opportunity used tools on its robotic arm to examine this unusual material on a rock called “Chocolate Hills.” In some places, the layer of closely packed spheres lies between thinner, smoother layers.
“It looks like a blueberry sandwich,” said Matt Golombek, a rover science-team member at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.