Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASU
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASU
NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover is inspecting an interesting feature – a flat-topped rock.
It was chosen by the rover team as a stop for inspecting with tools on Opportunity’s robotic arm, just a few days after the rover arrived at the western rim of Endeavour crater.
The rock, dubbed Tisdale 2, displays a different texture than rocks that Opportunity has seen during its 90 months of survey work on Mars. The Mars robot is set to inspect the material tossed out by a by a small crater – Odyssey –at the rim of the huge Endeavor crater.
“We’re naming features after significant terrestrial ‘greenstone belts’- areas of Precambrian rock on Earth,” said Bill Farrand, a research scientist with the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado – and a member of the science team for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission.
“This is going to be our first target,” for on-the-spot investigation using Opportunity’s Instrument Deployment Device (IDD) equipment. With 5 degrees of freedom, the IDD represents the most dexterous robotic manipulator ever flown to another planetary surface. “So we’ll see what we find!”
“Morphologically, this rock, and most of the others scattered around Odyssey crater look a lot like breccias- agglomerations of smaller rocks and pebbles cemented together by an impact,” Farrand told this Coalition reporter. “We have to get an up-close look before we can say anything more definitive.”
By Leonard David